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Origin of the turn-on temperature behavior in WTe2.

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-29, 00:00 authored by YL Wang, LR Thoutam, ZL Xiao, J Hu, S Das, ZQ Mao, J Wei, R Divan, A Luican-Mayer, GW Crabtree, WK Kwok
A hallmark of materials with extremely large magnetoresistance (XMR) is the transformative turn-on temperature behavior: when the applied magnetic field H is above certain value, the resistivity versus temperature ρ(T ) curve shows a minimum at a field dependent temperature T ∗, which has been interpreted as a magnetic-field-driven metal-insulator transition or attributed to an electronic structure change. Here, we demonstrate that ρ(T ) curves with turn-on behavior in the newly discovered XMR material WTe2 can be scaled as MR ∼ (H/ρ0) m with m ≈ 2 and ρ0 being the resistivity at zero field. We obtained experimentally and also derived from the observed scaling the magnetic field dependence of the turn-on temperature T ∗ ∼ (H − Hc) ν with ν ≈ 1/2, which was earlier used as evidence for a predicted metal-insulator transition. The scaling also leads to a simple quantitative expression for the resistivity ρ∗ ≈ 2ρ0 at the onset of the XMR behavior, which fits the data remarkably well. These results exclude the possible existence of a magnetic-field-driven metal-insulator transition or significant contribution of an electronic structure change to the low-temperature XMR in WTe2. This work resolves the origin of the turn-on behavior observed in several XMR materials and also provides a general route for a quantitative understanding of the temperature dependence of MR in both XMR and non-XMR materials.

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. Use of the Center for Nanoscale Materials, an Office of Science user facility, was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02- 06CH11357. L.R.T. and Z.L.X. acknowledge NSF Grant No. DMR-1407175. The work at Tulane University was supported by the NSF under Grant DMR-1205469 and Louisiana Board of Regents under Grant LEQSF(2014-15)-ENH-TR-24.

History

Publisher Statement

This is a copy of an article published in Physical Review B © 2015 American Physical Society Publications.

Publisher

American Physical Society

issn

2469-9950

Issue date

2015-11-03

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