The recent discovery of large magnetoresistance in tungsten ditelluride provides a unique playground to find new phenomena and significant perspective for potential applications. The large magnetoresistance effect originates from a perfect balance of hole and electron carriers, which is sensitive to external pressure. Here we report the suppression of the large magnetoresistance and emergence of superconductivity in pressurized tungsten ditelluride via high-pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction, electrical resistance, magnetoresistance and alternating current magnetic susceptibility measurements. Upon increasing pressure, the positive large magnetoresistance effect is gradually suppressed and turned off at a critical pressure of 10.5 GPa, where superconductivity accordingly emerges. No structural phase transition is observed under the pressure investigated. In situ high-pressure Hall coefficient measurements at low temperatures demonstrate that elevating pressure decreases the population of hole carriers but increases that of the electron ones. Significantly, at the critical pressure, a sign change of the Hall coefficient is observed.

We present a study of angle-resolved quantum oscillations of electric and thermoelectric transport coefficients in semi-metallic WTe2, which has the particularity of displaying a large B 2 magnetoresistance. The Fermi surface consists of two pairs of electron-like and hole-like pockets of equal volumes in a "Russian doll" structure. Carrier density, Fermi energy, mobility and the mean-freepath of the system are quantified. An additional frequency is observed above a threshold field and attributed to magnetic breakdown across two orbits. In contrast to all other dilute metals, the Nernst signal remains linear in magnetic field even in the high-field (ωcτ ≫ 1) regime. Surprisingly, none of the pockets extend across the c-axis of the first Brillouin zone, making the system a three-dimensional metal with moderate anisotropy in Fermi velocity yet a large anisotropy in mean-free-path. 2 ) was reported with no sign of saturation up to 60 T[6]. This is the expected behavior of a perfectly-compensated semi-metal [7], but has not been seen in bismuth [8] or graphite [9], two compensated semi-metals whose Fermi surface is accurately known. A first step towards uncovering the ultimate reason behind the quadratic magnetoresistance of WTe 2 is a quantitative determination of the structure of the Fermi surface and the components of the mobility tensor.In this letter, we report on a study of quantum oscillations of resistivity, Seebeck and Nernst coefficients in high-quality single crystals of WTe 2 and find that the Fermi surface consists of two pairs of electron-like and hole-like pockets. Each pair is concentric with identical structure like a set of Russian dolls. The anisotropy is much smaller than one would naively expect in a layered system. The longer axis of the pockets is much shorter than the height of the Brillouin zone, in contrast to the theoretical expectations. Moreover, we find another distinctive feature of this semi-metal in addition to quadratic magnetoresistance, which is a Nernst response linear in magnetic field deep inside the high-field limit. Our results quantify carrier concentration of the system and set plausible quantitative windows for mobilities and Fermi energies leading to the huge quadratic magnetoresistance and large field-linear Nernst signal.