Gate-tunable negative longitudinal magnetoresistance in the predicted type-II Weyl semimetal WTe<sub>2</sub>.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 27725682.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms13142 and PMC identifier 5062597.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The progress in exploiting new electronic materials has been a major driving force in solid-state physics. As a new state of matter, a Weyl semimetal (WSM), in particular a type-II WSM, hosts Weyl fermions as emergent quasiparticles and may harbour novel electrical transport properties. Nevertheless, such a type-II WSM material has not been experimentally observed. In this work, by performing systematic magneto-transport studies on thin films of a predicted material candidate WTe<sub>2</sub>, we observe notable negative longitudinal magnetoresistance, which can be attributed to the chiral anomaly in WSM. This phenomenon also exhibits strong planar orientation dependence with the absence along the tungsten chains, consistent with the distinctive feature of a type-II WSM. By applying a gate voltage, we demonstrate that the Fermi energy can be in-situ tuned through the Weyl points via the electric field effect. Our results may open opportunities for implementing new electronic applications, such as field-effect chiral devices.