Cleaving plane-dependent electronic structures of transition metal diarsenides

Cleaving plane-dependent electronic structures of transition metal diarsenides

Blog Article

Topological Dirac and Weyl semimetals are currently attracting intense interest due to their exotic physical properties.Transition metal shohoof diarsenides such as MoAs_{2} and WAs_{2} have been reported to harbor very high magnetoresistance suggesting the possible existence of a topological quantum state, although this conclusion remains dubious.Here, using systematic angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements and parallel first-principles calculations, we discuss the electronic structures of TAs_{2} (T = Mo, W).

Two different cleavage planes of MoAs_{2} are found to harbor distinctly different surface states.Our experiments show the presence of Dirac-like dispersions on the (001) plane, which our first-principles calculations ascribe to trivial surface states.Our in-depth study also finds WAs_{2} to possess a fr3345 trivial electronic structure.

Our study emphasizes the importance of identifying the cleavage plane in low-symmetry systems and indicates that topological semimetallic states are not the key for generating high magnetoresistance in MoAs_{2} and WAs_{2}.