Extremely large magnetoresistance and ultrahigh mobility in the topological Weyl semimetal candidate NbP

By C. Shekhar, A. Nayak, Yan Sun, M. Schmidt, M. Nicklas, I. Leermakers, U. Zeitler, Zhongkai Liu, Yulin Chen, W. Schnelle and 3 more. Nature Physics, 2015

998 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Weyl semimetals are predicted to exhibit a host of unusual transport properties. NbP, a system predicted to share characteristics of both normal and Weyl semimetals, is now shown to have a very large, non-saturating magnetoresistance. Recent experiments have revealed spectacular transport properties in semimetals, such as the large, non-saturating magnetoresistance exhibited by WTe2 (ref. 1). Topological semimetals with massless relativistic electrons have also been predicted2 as three-dimensional analogues of graphene3. These systems are known as Weyl semimetals, and are predicted to have a range of exotic transport properties and surface states4,5,6,7, distinct from those of topological insulators8,9. Here we examine the magneto-transport properties of NbP, a material the band structure of which has been predicted to combine the hallmarks of a Weyl semimetal10,11 with those of a normal semimetal. We observe an extremely large magnetoresistance of 850,000% at 1.85 K (250% at room temperature) in a magnetic field of up to 9 T, without any signs of saturation, and an ultrahigh carrier mobility of 5 × 106 cm2 V−1 s−1 that accompanied by strong Shubnikov–de Haas (SdH) oscillations. NbP therefore presents a unique example of a material combining topological and conventional electronic phases, with intriguing physical properties resulting from their interplay.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01a61515611716b185b0c73f5f0b69c808062bc3

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Citations in the corpus

Helicity protected ultrahigh mobility Weyl fermions in NbP (2015, background): “ations as a function of the angle (θ) between B and the c-axis, while keeping B always perpendicular to the electric field (E). When θ=0°, all possible WSM electron pockets and parabolic hole pockets [1,6,17] are quantized equivalently due to the four-fold rotation symmetry of the Brillouin zone [1]”
Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, neutral): “…for XMR has been under some debate; with many of these materials exhibiting some form of topological order, some works have suggested that the XMR is associated with the lifting of topological protection by the external magnetic field (Liang et al., 2015; Shekhar et al., 2015; Tafti et al., 2016).”
Nodal-knot semimetals (2017, background): “[19] Chandra Shekhar, Ajaya K Nayak, Yan Sun, Marcus Schmidt, Michael Nicklas, Inge Leermakers, Uli Zeitler, Yurii Skourski, Jochen Wosnitza, Zhongkai Liu, et al.”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “A strong negative angular longitudinal MR has been reported for TaAs, NbAs, TaP, NbP and interpreted as this chiral magnetic effect (Du et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2015b; Shekhar et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2016i; Yang et al., 2015c; Zhang et al., 2016a).”