Weyl nodes are topological objects in three-dimensional metals. Their topological property can be revealed by studying the high-field transport properties of a Weyl semimetal. While the energy of the lowest Landau band (LLB) of a conventional Fermi p
ocket always increases with magnetic field due to the zero point energy, the LLB of Weyl cones remains at zero energy unless a strong magnetic field couples the Weyl fermions of opposite chirality. In the Weyl semimetal TaP, we achieve such a magnetic coupling between the electron-like Fermi pockets arising from the W1 Weyl fermions. As a result, their LLBs move above chemical potential, leading to a sharp sign reversal in the Hall resistivity at a specific magnetic field corresponding to the W1 Weyl node separation. By contrast, despite having almost identical carrier density, the annihilation is unobserved for the hole-like pockets because the W2 Weyl nodes are much further separated. These key findings, corroborated by other systematic analyses, reveal the nontrivial topology of Weyl fermions in high-field measurements.
Compared with the semiconductors such as silicon and gallium arsenide which have been used widely for decades, semimetals have not received much attention in the field of condensed matter physics until very recently. The realization of electronic top
ological properties has motivated interest of investigations on Dirac semimetals and Weyl semimetals, which are predicted to show unprecedented features beyond the classical electronic theories of metals. In this letter for the first time we report the electric transport properties of a robust Weyl semimetal candidate proposed by recent theoretical calculations, TaAs. Our study shows that this bulk material manifests ultrahigh carrier mobility ($mathrm{5times10^5 cm^2/Vcdot{s}}$) accompanied by an extremely large, unsaturated linear magnetoresistance ($mathrm{MR}$), which reaches 5400 at 10 Kelvins in a magnetic field of 9 Teslas and 2.47$times$10$^4$ at 1.5 Kelvins in a magnetic field of 56 Teslas. We also observed strong Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations associated with an extremely low quantum limit ($sim$8 Teslas). Further studies on TaAs, especially in the ultraquantum limit regime, will help to extend the realization of the topological properties of these exotic electrons.
