Anisotropic and extreme magnetoresistance in the magnetic semimetal candidate Erbium monobismuthide

TL;DR

This study investigates ErBi, revealing its extreme magnetoresistance, anisotropic Fermi surface effects, and magnetic properties, highlighting its potential for advanced electronic applications.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of ErBi's magnetic, electrical, and anisotropic magnetoresistance properties, linking them to its electronic band structure and Fermi surface topology.

Findings

ErBi exhibits ~10^4% magnetoresistance at low temperatures.

Magnetoresistance shows twofold and fourfold symmetry depending on field orientation.

Electronic structure calculations reveal similarities with LaBi, explaining transport behavior.

Abstract

Rare-earth monopnictides display rich physical behaviors, featuring most notably spin and orbital orders in their ground state. Here, we grow ErBi single crystal and study its magnetic, thermal and electrical properties. An analysis of the magnetic entropy and magnetization indicates that the weak magnetic anisotropy in ErBi possibly derives from the mixing effect, namely the anisotropic ground state of Er3+ (4f11) mingles with the isotropic excited state through exchange interaction. At low temperature, an extremely large magnetoresistance (~104%) with a parabolic magnetic-field dependence is observed, which can be ascribed to the nearly perfect electron-hole compensation and ultrahigh carrier mobility. When the magnetic field is rotated in the ab (ac) plane and the current flows in the b axis, the angular magnetoresistance in ErBi shows a twofold (fourfold) symmetry. Similar case has been observed in LaBi where the anisotropic Fermi surface dominates the low-temperature transport. Our theoretical calculation suggests that near the Fermi level ErBi shares similarity with LaBi in the electronic band structures. These findings indicate that the angular magnetoresistance of ErBi could be mainly determined by its anisotropic Fermi surface topology. Besides, contributions from several other possibilities, including the spin-dependent scattering, spin-orbit scattering, and demagnetization correlation to the angular magnetoresistance of ErBi are also discussed.