Electrical resistivity and Hall effect in lanthanum monobismuthide in magnetic fields to 13 T

Presence of exotic electronic surface states in LaBi and LaSb

“…1(c) and (d), the highest slope in the lowtemperature upturn remains at constant temperature. The transport results presented here are consistent with those of other groups [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][42][43][44] , and serve to demonstrate that the crystals on which we report ARPES behave exactly as expected.…”

“…Recently, the lanthanum monopnictides LaX (X = P, As, Sb and Bi) were predicted to be topological insulators 22 . This inspired an explosion of mainly transport work on LaSb [23][24][25] , LaBi 23,[26][27][28][29] , and YSb [30][31][32] , all of which crystallize in the well-known NaCl structure. All show a large unsaturated magnetoresistance, which is often attributed to the quantum limit of the Dirac fermions 33 , but may also arise from complicated factors such as electron-hole compensation 34,35 .…”

Three-dimensional band structure of LaSb and CeSb: Absence of band inversion

“…Recently, it was predicted from the first-principles band-structure calculations by Zeng et al [17] that lanthanum (La) monopnictide with rock-salt structure LaX (X = N, P, As, Sb, and Bi) becomes either topological Dirac semimetal (for X = N) or 3D TI (for X = P, As, Sb, and Bi) with Dirac fermions at the surface, due to the band inversion at the X point of bulk fcc Brillouin zone (BZ). While rare-earth monopnictide RX (R: rare earth) was intensively studied in 1980-90's in relation to heavy-fermion physics [18][19][20][21][22][23][24], the proposal by Zeng et al [17] renewed the interest for RX in topological aspects and triggered intensive transport, spectroscopic, and theoretical studies [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43], resulting in the discovery of extremely large magnetoresistance and unusual resistivity plateau in LaSb and LaBi [29][30][31][32][33][34][35], as well as the observation of Dirac-cone-like feature in some RX compounds [38][39][40][41][42][43].…”

Unusual change in the Dirac-cone energy band upon a two-step magnetic transition in CeBi

“…Recently, Zeng et al predicted from the first-principles band-structure calculations [20] that LaX p becomes a topological insulator due to the band inversion at the X point of bulk BZ. This report has renewed the interest for RX p (R = La and Ce) systems in topological aspects and triggered intensive theoretical and experimental investigations [12,, resulting in the discovery of extremely large magnetoresistance and unusual resistivity plateau in LaSb and LaBi [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30], as well as the observation of Dirac-cone-like energy band in some RX p compounds [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48]. While RSb was turned out to be topologically trivial [37, 41, 43, and 46], ARPES studies of LaBi [37, 39, 40, 42, and 44] have commonly revealed the Dirac-cone-like energy band of topological origin at the Γ and M point of the surface BZ, associated with the band inversion at the X point [note that the M point is equivalent to the projected bulk X point; see Fig.…”