Zirconium pentatelluride ZrTe5, a fascinating topological material platform, hosts exotic chiral fermions in its highly anisotropic three-dimensional Dirac band and holds great promise advancing the next-generation information technology. However, the origin underlying its anomalous resistivity peak has been under debate for decades. Here we provide transport evidence substantiating the anomaly to be a direct manifestation of a Lifshitz transition in the Dirac band with an ultrahigh carrier mobility exceeding 3×105 cm2 V−1 s−1. We demonstrate that the Lifshitz transition is readily controllable by means of carrier doping, which sets the anomaly peak temperature Tp. Tp is found to scale approximately as nH0.27, where the Hall carrier concentration nH is linked with the Fermi level by ϵF∝nH1/3 in a linearly dispersed Dirac band. This relation indicates Tp monotonically increases with ϵF, which serves as an effective knob for fine tuning transport properties in pentatelluride-based Dirac semimetals.
@article{arxiv.1701.04737,
title = {Lifshitz transition mediated electronic transport anomaly in bulk ZrTe5},
author = {Hang Chi and Cheng Zhang and Genda Gu and Dmitri E. Kharzeev and Xi Dai and Qiang Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1701.04737},
year = {2017}
}