Although any evidence of chiral Weyl fermions as fundamental particles in vacuum is still lacking, recent advances in topological condensed matter physics [1,2] provide a new way of realizing them in Weyl semimetals (WSMs). In an ideal WSM, bands without spin degeneracy cross at pairs of points at the Fermi level, the Weyl nodes, and the corresponding low-energy excitations fulfill the Weyl equation [3,4].As a consequence, the quasiparticles in a WSM show the same exotic behaviors as Weyl fermions, such as the chiral anomaly effect [5][6][7] that can induce a negative longitudinal magneto-resistance (MR). Another hallmark of a WSM is the existence of anomalous surface states protected by the bulk band topology, the so-called Fermi arcs [8,9]. The WSM state has been proposed in magnetic systems [8,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], Dirac semimetals [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27] under magnetic field [28], as well as photonic crystals [29,30].Recently, non-magnetic transition-metal monopnictides with broken inversion symmetry (the crystal structure and the first Brillouin zone (BZ) of these materials are shown in Fig. 1a-c [35,41] surfaces, the magnetotransport behaviors related to the chiral anomaly effect are distinct among the different compounds. The negative longitudinal MR, which has a maximum value of -30% at ~6 T in TaAs [42] and as large as -3000% at 9T in TaP without any sign of saturation [43,44], has never been observed in NbP [45,46]. The apparent disagreement between the transport and spectroscopic signatures of WSM raises the questions of whether the observation of topological Fermi arcs is sufficient to identify a WSM phase [38,47], and whether the negative longitudinal MR in transition-metal monopnictides is not induced by the chiral anomaly but rather by the axial anomaly effect, which is not related to the Weyl fermion quasiparticles [48].Here, we present a comparative study of transition-metal monopnictides by Polycrystalline NbP (TaP) was synthesized by a solid-state reaction using elemental niobium (tantalum) and red phosphorus with a minimum purity of 99.99 %. The respective amounts of starting reagents were mixed and pressed into pellets in a Heglove box and annealed in an evacuated quartz ampule at 1050 °C for 60 hours.Laboratory x-ray diffraction measurements, which were done at room temperature using Cu Ka radiation on a Brucker D8 diffractometer, have shown that the obtained crystals are single phase with the tetragonal structure of space group I41/amd (N 141).Clean surfaces for ARPES measurements were obtained by cleaving NbP and TaP samples in a vacuum better than 5 × 10 -11 Torr. Surface-sensitive VUV-ARPES measurements were performed with circular-polarized light at the Surface/Interface Spectroscopy (SIS) beamline at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) with a Scienta R4000.Bulk-sensitive soft X-ray ARPES measurements were performed at the Advanced Resonant Spectroscopies (ADRESS) beamline at SLS [49] using a SPECS analyser, and data were collected using circular-polarized light w...