Detection of Weyl fermions and the metal to Weyl-semimetal phase transition in WTe2 via broadband high resolution NMR

W. Papawassiliou, J. P. Carvalho, H. J. Kim, C. Y. Kim, S. J. Yoo, J. B. Lee, S. Alhassan, S. Orfanidis, V. Psycharis, M. Karagianni, M. Fardis, N. Panopoulos, G. Papavassiliou, A. J. Pell

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Abstract

Weyl fermions (WFs) in the type-II Weyl semimetal (WSM) WTe2 are difficult to resolve experimentally because the Weyl bands disperse in an extremely narrow region of the (E-k) space. Here, by using DFT-assisted high-resolution Te125 solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) in the temperature range 50-700 K, we succeeded in detecting low energy WF excitations and monitoring their evolution with temperature. Remarkably, WFs are observed to emerge at T∼120 K, while at lower temperatures WTe2 behaves as a trivial metal. This intriguing phenomenon is induced by the rapid raise of the Fermi level upon heating, which crosses the Weyl bands only for T>120 K. The abrupt change of the NMR parameters at this temperature is signature of a topological Lifshitz transition instead of a cursive energy-bands crossing.

Original languageBritish English
Article number033133
JournalPhysical Review Research
Volume4
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2022

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