Large, non-saturating magnetoresistance in WTe2

Abstract

Magnetoresistance is the change in a material's electrical resistance in response to an applied magnetic field. Materials with large magnetoresistance have found use as magnetic sensors, in magnetic memory, and in hard drives at room temperature, and their rarity has motivated many fundamental studies in materials physics at low temperatures. Here we report the observation of an extremely large positive magnetoresistance at low temperatures in the non-magnetic layered transition-metal dichalcogenide WTe2: 452,700 per cent at 4.5 kelvins in a magnetic field of 14.7 teslas, and 13 million per cent at 0.53 kelvins in a magnetic field of 60 teslas. In contrast with other materials, there is no saturation of the magnetoresistance value even at very high applied fields. Determination of the origin and consequences of this effect, and the fabrication of thin films, nanostructures and devices based on the extremely large positive magnetoresistance of WTe2, will represent a significant new direction in the study of magnetoresistivity.

Anomalous magnetotransport properties of high-quality single crystals of Weyl semimetal WTe2: Sign change of Hall resistivity

“…Layered transition-metal dichalcogenides typically sharing the formula, TMTe2, where TM is a transition metal (e.g., Mo or W), are candidate materials of so-called "type II" Weyl semimetal [5]. One such example is WTe2, which shows extremely large non-saturating magnetoresistance suggesting the compensation of electrons and holes [6]. Fourier transform spectra of Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations show that WTe2 has four Fermi pockets, i.e., two sets of concentric electron-and hole-Fermi pockets [7][8][9][10], being consistent with band structure calculations [7].…”

Quantum Effects and Phase Tuning in Epitaxial Hexagonal and Monoclinic MoTe2 Monolayers

“…[1,9,10,11,12] The 1T' or Td phase MX 2 are of the distorted 1T structure, which usually show semi-metallic behavior. [3,[13][14][15] Examples of the latter include WTe 2 and -MoTe 2 , which have drawn special interests lately following some recent revelations of, e.g., the large and unsaturated magnetoresistance, [4,15,16,17,18] pressure-driven superconductivity, [7,19] novel optical properties and characteristics, [11,12,17,18,20] and the topological insulator [14] and Weyl semimetal states. [6,7,21] Metallic TMDs are also good catalysts for hydrodesulfurization and hydrogen evolution reactions.…”

“…[1,2,[3][4][5][6][7] The 2H phase is most common including, for example, metal disulfides (MS 2 ) and diselenides (MSe 2 ), which are direct gap semiconductors for monolayer (ML) thin films. [1,8] They have attracted extensive research attention in recent years due to their appeals in microelectronic, optoelectronic, spin and valley electronic applications.…”

The codes of matter and their applications

“…2 with parabolic dispersion. This type of semimetal (here, we denote it as an electron-hole compensated semimetal or Dirac electronhole compensated semimetal for parabolic or linear E-K dispersion, respectively) is highly possible in real materials, and we expect it to give a perfect electron-hole resonance effect and exotic magnetoelectronic states, such as the extremely large magnetoresistance observed in WTe 2 with compensated electrons and holes [6].…”

“…The Table S1 (online) is reproduced as Table S14 (online) in order to clearly illustrate existing elemental particles associating with codes in Table S1 (online). The codes 1 and 13 in Table S1 (online) may indicate massless and spinless charged particles, the codes 2 and 14 in Table S1 (online) represent particles with spin and charge, while the codes 5, 9, 17, 21 (6,10,18,22) in Table S1 (online) represent charged particles that are spinless (have spin); the codes 29 (30) and 33 (34) in Table S1 (online) are for particles that are chargeless without (with) spin. Code 25 in Table S1 (online) represents a particle that has no Q, S, and K which may direct to a new massive or massless particle.…”