Bipolar Conduction as the Possible Origin of the Electronic Transition in Pentatellurides: Metallic vs Semiconducting Behavior

Shahi, Prashant; Singh, David J.; Sun, J. P.; Zhao, Lin; Chen, G. F.; Lv, Yang‐Yang; Li, J.; Yan, Jiaqiang; Mandrus, David; Cheng, Jinguang

doi:10.1103/physrevx.8.021055

Cited by 88 publications

(130 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…The nontrivial Berry phase (~ π) in ZrTe 5-δ was obtained from the Shubnikov with that reported. [41] Not surprisingly, we also observed a sign change in Hall resistance near 135 K accompanied by the change of dominated carrier from n-type to p-type, as shown in Fig. 1(d) and its inset.…”

supporting

confidence: 66%

Giant planar Hall effect in the Dirac semimetal ZrTe5−δ

Zhang

et al. 2018

Phys. Rev. B

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Recently, giant planar Hall effect originating from chiral anomaly has been predicted in nonmagnetic Dirac/Weyl semimetals. ZrTe 5 is considered to be an intriguing Dirac semimetal at the boundary of weak topological insulators and strong topological insulators, though this claim still remains controversial. Here, we report the observation in ZrTe 5-δ of the giant planar Hall resistivity that shows two different magnetic-field dependences as predicted by theory and a maximum at the Lifshitz transition temperature. We found that the giant planar Hall resistivity fades out with decreasing the thickness of ZrTe 5-δ nanoplates, which may be ascribed to the vanishing of the 3D nature of the samples. In addition, we have observed a nontrivial Berry phase, chiral-anomaly-induced negative longitudinal magnetoresistance, and a giant in-plane anisotropic magnetoresistance in these ZrTe 5-δ nanoplates. All the experimental observations demonstrated coherently that ZrTe 5-δ is a Dirac semimetal.

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supporting

confidence: 66%

Giant planar Hall effect in the Dirac semimetal ZrTe5−δ

Zhang

et al. 2018

Phys. Rev. B

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“…, was extracted and fitted with the two-carrier model [42], hole carrier starts to appear. The mobility of hole carriers is greater than that of electron carriers, but the density of hole carriers is smaller, thus corresponding to an initial positive slope in ρxy (H) followed by a change to negative, consistent with previous studies [44]. At higher temperature, two hole carriers dominate, and meanwhile the electron carriers disappear.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 90%

“…ZrTe5 [44]. The observation of carrier type reversal as temperature increases support the Lifshitz transition.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 53%

Turning ZrTe5 into a semiconductor through atom intercalation

Wang

et al. 2019

Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron.

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In this work, we use the liquid ammonia method to successfully intercalate potassium atoms into ZrTe5 single crystal, and find a transition from semimetal to semiconductor at low temperature in the intercalated ZrTe5. The resistance anomalous peak is gradually suppressed and finally disappears with increasing potassium concentration. Whilst, the according sign reversal is always observed in the Hall resistance measurement. We tentatively attribute the semimetal-semiconductor transition to the lattice expansion induced by atomic intercalation and thereby a larger energy band gap.Recently, ZrTe5 has attracted increasing attentions because of its mysterious topological nature. DFT calculation predicted that the single-layer ZrTe5 is an ideal two-dimensional topological insulator (2D TI) hosting an indirect band gap of ~0.1 eV [9], but its bulk counterpart resides in proximity of the boundary of topological phase transition from weak to strong TI, through a 3D Dirac semimetal state [9][10][11].Even though great efforts have been devoted to experimentally verify the topological characteristics, the topology of bulk ZrTe5 is still under heavy debate. Either weak TI, strong TI or Dirac semimetal state, has ever been proposed based on the experimental observations with different techniques . The bulk band gap and the topological edge state were detected by ARPES and by STM [14,15,29], which indicates that ZrTe5 is a weak TI. Controversially, signatures of 3D Dirac semimetal were also demonstrated in magnetoresistance [18][19][20]32] and magneto-infrared spectroscopy measurements [12,13,17,24,25]. The strong TI of ZrTe5 has been also proposed [21,27]. In addition, more exotic physical properties have been also found in this material, such as Zeeman splitting [20,33,34], Chiral Magnetic effect (CME) [16], 3D Quantum Hall effect (QHE) [35], Anomalous Hall effect (AHE) [36], Giant Planar Hall Effect (PHE) [37], and Discrete Scale Invariance (DSI) [38,39].Considering the extreme sensitivity of the band structure of ZrTe5 to the lattice constant, the above mentioned experimental divergence may be likely due to the difference in sample growth. It is worthwhile noting that the Dirac node of ZrTe5 is not protected by the crystal symmetry, and a band gap can be opened by a perturbation to turn it into topological insulator. High Pressure was applied to tune ZrTe5 into superconductivity [40], and to induce topological phase transition [41]. The exfoliated ZrTe5 nanosheet shows metallic behavior and tunable resistance maximum, which can be ascribed to the thickness-dependent band structure [42,43]. Up to now, most of the explored ZrTe5 bulk samples, grown by CVT method, behave as metallic

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“…This possibility is verified in a recent experimental work by Shahi et al . They found that the resistance anomaly of ZrTe 5 , which was observed in many existing experiments, is due to the Te deficiency, while the nearly stoichiometric ZrTe 5 single crystal shows the normal semiconducting transport behavior27. In order to avoid the possible artificial effect induced by the cleavage in both STM and ARPES experiments, we suggest that nondestructive optical measurements for the existence of a direct band gap at Γ point, and its change under different temperatures, in the high quality and stoichiometric single crystals are probably useful to elucidate the topological nature in ZrTe 5 and HfTe 5 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Transition between strong and weak topological insulator in ZrTe5 and HfTe5

Fan

Liang

Chen

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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ZrTe5 and HfTe5 have attracted increasingly attention recently since the theoretical prediction of being topological insulators (TIs). However, subsequent works show many contradictions about their topolog-ical nature. Three possible phases, i.e. strong TI, weak TI, and Dirac semi-metal, have been observed in different experiments until now. Essentially whether ZrTe5 or HfTe5 has a band gap or not is still a question. Here, we present detailed first-principles calculations on the electronic and topological prop-erties of ZrTe5 and HfTe5 on variant volumes and clearly demonstrate the topological phase transition from a strong TI, going through an intermediate Dirac semi-metal state, then to a weak TI when the crystal expands. Our work might give a unified explain about the divergent experimental results and propose the crucial clue to further experiments to elucidate the topological nature of these materials.

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Bipolar Conduction as the Possible Origin of the Electronic Transition in Pentatellurides: Metallic vs Semiconducting Behavior

Cited by 88 publications

References 38 publications

Giant planar Hall effect in the Dirac semimetal ZrTe5−δ

Giant planar Hall effect in the Dirac semimetal ZrTe5−δ

Turning ZrTe5 into a semiconductor through atom intercalation

Transition between strong and weak topological insulator in ZrTe5 and HfTe5

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