Giant magnetoresistance, Fermi surface topology, Shoenberg effect and vanishing quantum oscillations in type-II Dirac semimetal candidates MoSi2 and WSi2
Abstract
We performed comprehensive theoretical and experimental studies of the electronic structure and the Fermi surface topology of two novel quantum materials, MoSi2 and WSi2. The theoretical predictions of the electronic structure in the vicinity of the Fermi level was verified experimentally by thorough analysis of the observed quantum oscillations in both electrical resistivity and magnetostriction. We established that the Fermi surface sheets in MoSi2 and WSi2 consist of 3D dumbbell-shaped hole-like pockets and rosette-shaped electron-like pockets, with nearly equal volumes. Based on this finding, both materials were characterized as almost perfectly compensated semimetals. In conjunction, the magnetoresistance attains giant values of 104 and 105\,\% for WSi2 and MoSi2, respectively. In turn, the anisotropic magnetoresistance achieves -95 and -98\,\% at T=2\,K and in B=14\,T for WSi2 and MoSi2, respectively. Furthermore, for both compounds we observed the Shoenberg effect in their Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations that persisted at as high temperature as T=25\,K in MoSi2 and T=12\,K in WSi2. In addition, we found for MoSi2 a rarely observed spin-zero phenomenon. Remarkably, the electronic structure calculations revealed type-II Dirac cones located near 480 meV and 710 meV above the Fermi level in MoSi2 and WSi2, respectively.
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