Fermi surface topology and magnetotransport in semimetallic LuSb

Abstract

Several rare-earth monopnictides were shown to exhibit extreme magnetoresistance and field-induced low-temperature plateau of electrical resistivity. These features are also hallmarks of topological semimetals, thus the family is intensively explored with respect to magneto-transport properties and possible hosting Dirac fermion states. We report a comprehensive investigation of Fermi surface and electrical transport properties of LuSb, another representative of this family. At low temperatures, the magnetoresistance of LuSb was found to exceed 3000% without saturation in fields up to 9 T. Analysis of the Hall effect and the Shubnikov–de Haas oscillations revealed that the Fermi surface of this compound consists of several pockets originating from fairly compensated multi-band electronic structure, in full accordance with our first-principles calculations. Observed magnetotransport properties of LuSb can be attributed to the topology of three-dimensional Fermi surface and a compensation of electron and hole contributions.

Magnetic and Transport Properties of Possibly Topologically Nontrivial Half-Heusler Bismuthides RMBi (R = Y, Gd, Dy, Ho, Lu; M = Pd, Pt)

“…The lower critical field, B c1 , derived from these data is as small as about 10 µT. Similar magnitude of B c1 was reported for other half-Heusler superconductors [14,17].…”

“…4). Applied magnetic field has very weak impact on C(T ) of GdPdBi; a tiny shift of T N by only 0.3 K was found in a field of 9 T. As regards the superconducting half-Heusler phases, no anomaly in C(T ) has been found near T c for any of the investigated materials [14][15][16]. The key objective in our on-going detailed studies on half-Heusler bismuthides is experimental verification of the hypothesis on their non-trivial topological nature.…”

“…1b, YPtBi, LuPtBi, HoPdBi, and LuPdBi exhibit superconductivity below 0.96, 0.9, 0.7, and 1.8 K, respectively (see also our papers [14][15][16]). These values of the critical temperature agree fairly well with those reported before [6,[11][12][13].…”

“…In line with the behavior expected for topological insulators, the electrical conduction in a few RMBi compounds was found governed by two parallel channels: semiconducting-and metallic-like, with the former one being negligible at low temperatures (for details see Refs. [14][15][16]). In weak magnetic fields, the transverse magnetoresistance (MR) of LuPdBi (Fig.…”

Observation of quantum oscillations in FIB fabricated nanowires of topological insulator (Bi2Se3)

“…Generally in TIs, WAL effect is observed around zero magnetic field which is the destructive interference of two electron waves [37,38] and similar was also observed in sample N15…”