Negative magnetoresistance without well-defined chirality in the Weyl semimetal TaP

By F. Arnold, C. Shekhar, Shu-chun Wu, Yan Sun, R. D. dos Reis, M. Naumann, M. O. Ajeesh, M. Schmidt, A. Grushin, J. Bardarson and 7 more. Nature Communications, 2015

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Weyl semimetals (WSMs) are topological quantum states wherein the electronic bands disperse linearly around pairs of nodes with fixed chirality, the Weyl points. In WSMs, nonorthogonal electric and magnetic fields induce an exotic phenomenon known as the chiral anomaly, resulting in an unconventional negative longitudinal magnetoresistance, the chiral-magnetic effect. However, it remains an open question to which extent this effect survives when chirality is not well-defined. Here, we establish the detailed Fermi-surface topology of the recently identified WSM TaP via combined angle-resolved quantum-oscillation spectra and band-structure calculations. The Fermi surface forms banana-shaped electron and hole pockets surrounding pairs of Weyl points. Although this means that chirality is ill-defined in TaP, we observe a large negative longitudinal magnetoresistance. We show that the magnetoresistance can be affected by a magnetic field-induced inhomogeneous current distribution inside the sample. Magnetoresistance of topological semimetal shows unusual electron transport behaviour. Here, Arnold et al. demonstrate detailed Fermi surface topology of Weyl semimetal TaP and show that negative longitudinal magnetoresistance shows up without well-defined Weyl fermions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f5d01c101f9142bb38cb461f43fa96b36164e91

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Citations in the corpus

Z2Pack: Numerical Implementation of Hybrid Wannier Centers for Identifying Topological Materials (2016, background): “[151] Frank Arnold, Chandra Shekhar, Shu-Chun Wu, Yan Sun, Ricardo Donizeth dos Reis, Nitesh Kumar, Marcel Naumann, Mukkattu O Ajeesh, Marcus Schmidt, Adolfo G Grushin, et al.”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, background): “The situations seems to be simpler in TaAs due to the more favorable positioning of EF , but even there there are three different types of Fermi surface pockets oscillations found in magnetization, magnetic torque, and magnetoresistance measurements (Arnold et al., 2016a).”