Strong and Tunable Electrical-Anisotropy in Type-II Weyl Semimetal Candidate WP2 with Broken Inversion Symmetry

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that WP2, a candidate type-II Weyl semimetal, exhibits strong, temperature-dependent electrical anisotropy that can be tuned with magnetic fields, highlighting its potential for electronic applications.

Contribution

The paper provides experimental evidence of broken inversion symmetry in WP2 and reveals its highly tunable electrical anisotropy at low temperatures.

Findings

WP2 shows the strongest in-plane electrical resistivity anisotropy among type-II WSMs.

Anisotropy ratio Rc/Ra increases sharply below 100 K, reaching 8.0 at 10 K.

Magnetic field can tune the resistivity anisotropy from 8.0 to 10.6 at 10 K.

Abstract

A transition metal diphosphide WP2 is a candidate for type-II Weyl semimetals (WSMs) in which spatial inversion symmetry is broken and Lorentz invariance is violated. As one of the key prerequisites for the presence of the WSM state in WP2, spatial inversion symmetry breaking in this compound has rarely been investigated by experiments. Furthermore, how much anisotropy the electrical properties of WP2 have and whether its electrical anisotropy can be tuned remain elusive. Here, we report angle-resolved polarized Raman spectroscopy, electrical transport, optical spectroscopy and first-principle studies of WP2. The energies of the observed Raman-active phonons and the angle dependences of the phonon intensities are well consistent with the results obtained by first-principle calculations and the analysis of the proposed crystal symmetry without spatial inversion, providing evidence that spatial inversion symmetry is broken in WP2. Moreover, the measured ratio (Rc/Ra) between the crystalline c-axis and a-axis electrical resistivities exhibits a weak dependence on temperature from 100 to 250 K, but increases abruptly below 100 K, and then reaches the value of 8.0 at 10 K, which is by far the strongest in-plane electrical resistivity anisotropy among the reported type-II WSM candidates with comparable carrier concentrations. Our optical-spectroscopy and calculation studies reveal that the abrupt enhancement of the Rc/Ra below 100 K mainly arises from a sharp increase in the scattering rate anisotropy at low temperatures. More interestingly, the Rc/Ra at 10 K can be tuned from 8.0 to 10.6 as the magnetic field increases from 0 to 9 T. The stronge and tunable electrical resistivity anisotropy found in WP2 can serve as a degree of freedom for tuning the electrical properties of type-II WSMs, which paves the way for developing novel electronic applications based on type-II WSMs.