Experimental observation of topological Fermi arcs in type-II Weyl semimetal MoTe2

By K. Deng, Guoliang Wan, P. Deng, Kenan Zhang, S. Ding, E. Wang, Mingzhe Yan, Huaqing Huang, Hongyun Zhang, Zhilin Xu and 10 more. Nature Physics, 2016

707 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observations of topological surface states provide strong evidence that MoTe2 is a type-II Weyl semimetal, hosting Weyl fermions that have no counterpart in high-energy physics. Weyl semimetal is a new quantum state of matter1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 hosting the condensed matter physics counterpart of the relativistic Weyl fermions13 originally introduced in high-energy physics. The Weyl semimetal phase realized in the TaAs class of materials features multiple Fermi arcs arising from topological surface states10,11,14,15,16 and exhibits novel quantum phenomena, such as a chiral anomaly-induced negative magnetoresistance17,18,19 and possibly emergent supersymmetry20. Recently it was proposed theoretically that a new type (type-II) of Weyl fermion21,22 that arises due to the breaking of Lorentz invariance, which does not have a counterpart in high-energy physics, can emerge as topologically protected touching between electron and hole pockets. Here, we report direct experimental evidence of topological Fermi arcs in the predicted type-II Weyl semimetal MoTe2 (refs 23,24,25). The topological surface states are confirmed by directly observing the surface states using bulk- and surface-sensitive angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and the quasi-particle interference pattern between the putative topological Fermi arcs in scanning tunnelling microscopy. By establishing MoTe2 as an experimental realization of a type-II Weyl semimetal, our work opens up opportunities for probing the physical properties of this exciting new state.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52bf4ab086d79221eb82b75fc0eccbc321a5388d

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Citations in the corpus

Fermi Arcs and Their Topological Character in the Candidate Type-II Weyl Semimetal MoTe 2 (2016, background): “[27] Ke Deng, Guoliang Wan, Peng Deng, Kenan Zhang, Shijie Ding, Eryin Wang, Mingzhe Yan, Huaqing Huang, Hongyun Zhang, Zhilin Xu, Jonathan Denlinger, Alexei Fedorov, Haitao Yang, Wenhui Duan, Hong Yao, Yang Wu, Y Shoushan Fan, Haijun Zhang, Xi Chen, and Shuyun Zhou, “Experimental observation of top”
Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, neutral): “While type II Weyl semimetals have been reported in ARPES measurements (Deng et al., 2016; Huang et al., 2016a), subsequent work has shown that unambiguous identification is not straightforward since the distinction between topologically trivially and nontrivially Fermi arcs in the ARPES data can…”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, methodology): “More recently, Type II WSMs which have strongly tilted Weyl cones have been proposed to exist in the layered transition-metal dichalcogenides WTe2 (Soluyanov et al., 2015), MoTe2 (Sun et al., 2015a; Wang et al., 2016g) and their alloys MoxW1−xTe2 (Chang et al., 2016f).”
Type-III and Tilted Dirac Cones Emerging from Flat Bands in Photonic Orbital Graphene (2018, background): “Type-III Dirac points have not yet been reported experimentally, and tilted type-I and type-II Dirac points have been challenging to synthesize [13,18,20] because”