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, MoS2), recently discovered unexpected properties of WTe2 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 WTe2, MoTe2, predicted to be a Weyl semimetal and a quantum spin Hall insulator in bulk and monolayer form, respectively. We find that bulk MoTe2 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.

The peculiar band structure of semimetals exhibiting Dirac and Weyl crossings can lead to spectacular electronic properties such as large mobilities accompanied by extremely high magnetoresistance. In particular, two closely neighboring Weyl points of the same chirality are protected from annihilation by structural distortions or defects, thereby significantly reducing the scattering probability between them. Here we present the electronic properties of the transition metal diphosphides, WP2 and MoP2, which are type-II Weyl semimetals with robust Weyl points by transport, angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and first principles calculations. Our single crystals of WP2 display an extremely low residual low-temperature resistivity of 3 nΩ cm accompanied by an enormous and highly anisotropic magnetoresistance above 200 million % at 63 T and 2.5 K. We observe a large suppression of charge carrier backscattering in WP2 from transport measurements. These properties are likely a consequence of the novel Weyl fermions expressed in this compound.

Electron spin resonance (ESR) measurements of the ferromagnetic (FM) Kondo lattice system CeRuPO show a well defined ESR signal which is related to the Ce3+ magnetism. In contrast, no ESR could be observed in the antiferromagnetic (AFM) homologue CeOsPO. Additionally, we detect an ESR signal in ferromagnetic YbRh while it was absent in a number of Ce or Yb intermetallic compounds with dominant AFM exchange. Thus, the observation of an ESR signal in a Kondo lattice is neither specific to Yb nor to the proximity to a quantum critical point, but seems to be connected to the presence of FM fluctuations. These conclusions not only provide a basic concept to understand the ESR in Kondo lattice systems even well below the Kondo temperature (as observed in YbRh2Si2) but point out ESR as a prime method to investigate directly the spin dynamics of the Kondo ion.

We present a detailed quantum oscillatory study on the Dirac type-II semimetallic candidates PdTe2 and PtTe2 via the temperature and the angular dependence of the de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) and Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) effects. In high quality single crystals of both compounds, i.e. displaying carrier mobilities between 10 3 and 10 4 cm 2 /Vs, we observed a large non-saturating magnetoresistivity (MR) which in PtTe2 at a temperature T = 1.3 K, leads to an increase in the resistivity up to 5 × 10 4 % under a magnetic field µ0H = 62 T. These high mobilities correlate with their light effective masses in the range of 0.04 to 1 bare electron mass according to our measurements. For PdTe2 the experimentally determined Fermi surface cross-sectional areas show an excellent agreement with those resulting from band-structure calculations. Surprisingly, this is not the case for PtTe2 whose agreement between calculations and experiments is relatively poor even when electronic correlations are included in the calculations. Therefore, our study provides a strong support for the existence of a Dirac type-II node in PdTe2 and probably also for PtTe2. Band structure calculations indicate that the topologically non-trivial bands of PtTe2 do not cross the Fermi-level (εF). In contrast, for PdTe2 the Dirac type-II cone does intersect εF , although our calculations also indicate that the associated cyclotron orbit on the Fermi surface is located in a distinct kz plane with respect to the one of the Dirac type-II node. Therefore it should yield a trivial Berry-phase.

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