Comparative $^{181}$Ta-NQR Study of Weyl Monopnictides TaAs and TaP: Relevance of Weyl Fermion Excitations

Abstract

Based on our first detailed $^{181}$Ta nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) studies from 2017 on the Weyl semimetal TaP, we now extended our NQR studies to another Ta-based monopnictide TaAs. In the present work, we have determined the temperature-dependent $^{181}$Ta-NQR spectra, the spin-lattice relaxation time $T_{1}$, and the spin-spin relaxation time $T_{2}$. We found the following characteristic features that showed great contrast to what was found in TaP: (1) The quadrupole coupling constant and asymmetry parameter of EFG, extracted from three NQR frequencies, have a strong temperature dependence above $\sim$80 K that cannot be explained by the density functional theory calculation incorporating the thermal expansion of the lattice. (2) The temperature dependence of the spin-lattice relaxation rate, $1/T_{1} T$, shows a $T^{4}$ power law behavior above $\sim$30 K. This is a great contrast with the $1/T_{1} T \propto T^{2}$ behavior found in TaP, which was ascribed to the magnetic excitations at the Weyl nodes with a temperature-dependent orbital hyperfine coupling. (3) Regarding the nuclear spin-spin interaction, we found the spin-echo signal decays with the pulse separation simply by a Lorentzian function in TaAs, but we have observed spin-echo modulations in TaP that is most likely due to the indirect nuclear spin-spin coupling via virtually excited Weyl fermions. From our experimental findings, we conclude that the present NQR results do not show dominant contributions from Weyl fermion excitations in TaAs.