Transition-metal dichalcogenides (WTe2 and MoTe2) have drawn much attention, recently, because of the nonsaturating extremely large magnetoresistance (XMR) observed in these compounds in addition to the predictions of likely type-II Weyl semimetals. Contrary to the topological insulators or Dirac semimetals where XMR is linearly dependent on the field, in WTe2 and MoTe2 the XMR is nonlinearly dependent on the field, suggesting an entirely different mechanism. Electron-hole compensation has been proposed as a mechanism of this nonsaturating XMR in WTe2, while it is yet to be clear in the case of MoTe2 which has an identical crystal structure of WTe2 at low temperatures. In this paper, we report low-energy electronic structure and Fermi surface topology of MoTe2 using angle-resolved photoemission spectrometry (ARPES) technique and first-principle calculations, and compare them with that of WTe2 to understand the mechanism of XMR. Our measurements demonstrate that MoTe2 is an uncompensated semimetal, contrary to WTe2 in which compensated electron-hole pockets have been identified, ruling out the applicability of charge compensation theory for the nonsaturating XMR in MoTe2. In this context, we also discuss the applicability of the existing other conjectures on the XMR of these compounds.
@article{arxiv.1705.07217,
title = {MoTe2 : An uncompensated semimetal with extremely large magnetoresistance},
author = {S. Thirupathaiah and Rajveer Jha and Banabir Pal and J. S. Matias and P. Kumar Das and P. K. Sivakumar and I. Vobornik and N. C. Plumb and M. Shi and R. A. Ribeiro and D. D. Sarma},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.07217},
year = {2017}
}