Large Thermopower with Sign-Alternating Quantum Oscillations in Insulating Monolayer WTe2

TL;DR

This study reveals that magneto-thermoelectric measurements in insulating monolayer WTe2 can detect Landau-level-like structures and quantum oscillations, providing new insights into correlated electronic states with mixed metallic and insulating properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using magneto-thermopower to identify Landau quantization in an insulator, revealing quantum oscillations and sign-changes in thermopower.

Findings

Large thermopower exceeding k_B/e in insulating WTe2

Quantum oscillations observed in thermopower with sign-changes

Field-induced Landau-level-like structures detected in an insulator

Abstract

The detection of Landau-level-like energy structures near the chemical potential of an insulator is essential to the search for a class of correlated electronic matter hosting charge-neutral fermions and Fermi surfaces, a long-proposed concept that remains elusive experimentally. Here we introduce and demonstrate that the magneto-thermoelectric response of a quantum insulator can reveal critical information not available via other approaches. We report the observation of large Seebeck response together with quantum oscillations (QOs) in the hole-doped insulating state of monolayer tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) in magnetic fields. The measured low temperature magneto-thermopower exceeds k_B/e by more than an order of magnitude, where k_B is the Boltzmann constant and e the elementary charge. This large thermopower is a characteristic of an insulating state, consistent with high resistivity. However, as the magnetic field is swept, QOs develop in the thermopower, which remarkably undergoes sign-changes that mimic the quantum characteristic of metals due to Landau quantization. The sign-change in the thermoelectric response directly implies the presence of a field-induced Landau-level-like structure at the chemical potential of the insulator. Neither the large thermopower nor the sign-changes can be induced by the metallic gate nearby. Our results demonstrate a new dilemma for investigating low energy excitations in correlated materials featuring mixed quantum characteristics of metals and insulators.