Superconductivity in Weyl semimetal candidate MoTe2

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 7; no. 1; pp. 11038 - 7
• Main Authors: Qi, Yanpeng, Naumov, Pavel G., Ali, Mazhar N., Rajamathi, Catherine R., Schnelle, Walter, Barkalov, Oleg, Hanfland, Michael, Wu, Shu-Chun, Shekhar, Chandra, Sun, Yan, Süß, Vicky, Schmidt, Marcus, Schwarz, Ulrich, Pippel, Eckhard, Werner, Peter, Hillebrand, Reinald, Förster, Tobias, Kampert, Erik, Parkin, Stuart, Cava, R. J., Felser, Claudia, Yan, Binghai, Medvedev, Sergey A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 14.03.2016; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 140/133; 639/301/119/1003; 639/301/119/995; Electric Conductivity; Electronics; Electrons; Humanities and Social Sciences; Molybdenum - chemistry; multidisciplinary; Pressure; Quantum Theory; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Superconductivity; Tellurium - chemistry; Transition Temperature; Transition temperatures
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11038

Transition metal dichalcogenides have attracted research interest over the last few decades due to their interesting structural chemistry, unusual electronic properties, rich intercalation chemistry and wide spectrum of potential applications. Despite the fact that the majority of related research focuses on semiconducting transition-metal dichalcogenides (for example, MoS 2 ), recently discovered unexpected properties of WTe 2 are provoking strong interest in semimetallic transition metal dichalcogenides featuring large magnetoresistance, pressure-driven superconductivity and Weyl semimetal states. We investigate the sister compound of WTe 2 , MoTe 2 , predicted to be a Weyl semimetal and a quantum spin Hall insulator in bulk and monolayer form, respectively. We find that bulk MoTe 2 exhibits superconductivity with a transition temperature of 0.10 K. Application of external pressure dramatically enhances the transition temperature up to maximum value of 8.2 K at 11.7 GPa. The observed dome-shaped superconductivity phase diagram provides insights into the interplay between superconductivity and topological physics. Materials which simultaneously exhibit superconductivity and topologically non-trivial electronic band structure possess potential applications in quantum computing but have yet to be found. Here, the authors find superconductivity in MoTe 2 , a material predicted to be topologically non-trivial.