The recent discovery of large and non-saturating magnetoresistance (LMR) in WTe2 provides a unique playground to find new phenomena and significant perspective for potential applications. Here we report the first observation of superconductivity near the proximity of suppressed LMR state in pressurized WTe2 through high-pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction, electrical resistance, magnetoresistance, and ac magnetic susceptibility measurements. It is found that the positive magnetoresistance effect can be turned off at a critical pressure of 10.5 GPa without crystal structure change and superconductivity emerges simultaneously. The maximum superconducting transition temperature can be reached to 6.5 K at ~15 GPa and it decreases down to 2.6 K at ~25 GPa. In-situ high pressure Hall coefficient measurements at 10 K demonstrate that elevating pressure decreases hole carrier's population but increases electron carrier's population. Significantly, at the critical pressure, we observed a sign change in the Hall coefficient, indicating a possible Lifshitz-type quantum phase transition in WTe2.
@article{arxiv.1502.00493,
title = {Superconductivity emerging from suppressed large magnetoresistant state in WTe2},
author = {Defen Kang and Yazhou Zhou and Wei Yi and Chongli Yang and Jing Guo and Youguo Shi and Shan Zhang and Zhe Wang and Chao Zhang and Sheng Jiang and Aiguo Li and Ke Yang and Qi Wu and Guangming Zhang and Liling Sun and Zhongxian Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.00493},
year = {2019}
}