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Quantum limit transport and destruction of the Weyl nodes in TaAs

Cornell Affiliated Author(s)

Author

B. Ramshaw
K. Modic
Arkady Shekhter
Yi Zhang
Eun-Ah Kim
Philip Moll
Maja Bachmann
M. Chan
Jon Betts
Fedor Balakirev
A. Migliori
N. Ghimire
E. Bauer
F. Ronning
R. McDonald

Abstract

Weyl fermions are a recently discovered ingredient for correlated states of electronic matter. A key difficulty has been that real materials also contain non-Weyl quasiparticles, and disentangling the experimental signatures has proven challenging. Here we use magnetic fields up to 95 T to drive the Weyl semimetal TaAs far into its quantum limit, where only the purely chiral 0th Landau levels of the Weyl fermions are occupied. We find the electrical resistivity to be nearly independent of magnetic field up to 50 T: unusual for conventional metals but consistent with the chiral anomaly for Weyl fermions. Above 50 T we observe a two-order-of-magnitude increase in resistivity, indicating that a gap opens in the chiral Landau levels. Above 80 T we observe strong ultrasonic attenuation below 2 K, suggesting a mesoscopically textured state of matter. These results point the way to inducing new correlated states of matter in the quantum limit of Weyl semimetals. © 2018 The Author(s).

Date Published

Journal

Nature Communications

Volume

9

Issue

1

URL

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85048216665&doi=10.1038%2fs41467-018-04542-9&partnerID=40&md5=853feb8a16fcf67562d71a088d83bc43

DOI

10.1038/s41467-018-04542-9

Group (Lab)

Brad Ramshaw Group

Funding Source

DR20160085
DMR-1308089
LDRD 20160616ECR
1157490
1308089
715730

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