Quantum Oscillation of Thermally Activated Conductivity in a Monolayer WTe$_2$-like Excitonic Insulator

TL;DR

This paper explains the quantum oscillation of thermally activated conductivity in monolayer WTe$_2$-like excitonic insulators through gap modulation in hybridized Landau levels, accounting for anisotropic Fermi pockets.

Contribution

It demonstrates that monolayer WTe$_2$ can exhibit gap modulation and quantum oscillations in an excitonic insulator state with one hole and two electron pockets, considering band anisotropy.

Findings

Thermally activated conductivity shows 1/B periodic oscillations.

Discrete peaks in conductivity at low temperature match experiments.

Quantum oscillations diminish with increased band anisotropy.

Abstract

Recently, quantum oscillation of the resistance in insulating monolayer WTe$_2$ was reported. An explanation in terms of gap modulation in the hybridized Landau levels of an excitonic insulator was also proposed by one of us. However, the previous picture of gap modulation in the Landau levels spectrum was built on a pair of well nested electron and hole Fermi surfaces, while the monolayer WTe$_2$ has one hole and two electron Fermi pockets with relative anisotropy. Here we demonstrate that for system like monolayer WTe$_2$, the excitonic insulating state arising from the coupled one hole and two electron pockets possesses a finite region in interaction parameter space that shows gap modulation in a magnetic field. In this region, the thermally activated conductivity displays the $1/B$ periodic oscillation and it can further develop into discrete peaks at low temperature, in agreement with the experimental observation. We show that the relative anisotropy of the bands is a key parameter and the qunatum oscillations decrease rapidly if the anisotropy increases further than the realistic value for monolayer WTe$_2$.