Strong and Tunable Electrical Anisotropy in Type-II Weyl Semimetal Candidate WP₂ with Broken Inversion Symmetry

A transition metal diphosphide, WP₂ , is a candidate for type-II Weyl semimetals (WSMs) in which spatial inversion symmetry is broken and Lorentz invariance is violated. As one of the prerequisites for the presence of the WSM state in WP₂ , spatial inversion symmetry breaking in this compound has rarely been investigated. Furthermore, the anisotropy of the WP₂ electrical properties and whether its electrical anisotropy can be tuned remain elusive. Angle-resolved polarized Raman spectroscopy, electrical transport, optical spectroscopy, and first-principle studies of WP₂ are reported. The energies of the observed Raman-active phonons and the angle dependences of the detected phonon intensities are consistent with results obtained by first-principle calculations and analysis of the proposed crystal symmetry without spatial inversion, showing that spatial inversion symmetry is broken in WP₂ . Moreover, the measured ratio (R_c /R_a ) between the crystalline c-axis and a-axis electrical resistivities exhibits a weak dependence on temperature (T) in the temperature range from 100 to 250 K, but increases abruptly at T ≤ 100 K, and then reaches the value of ≈8.0 at T = 10 K, which is by far the strongest in-plane electrical resistivity anisotropy among the reported type-II WSM candidates with comparable carrier concentrations. Optical spectroscopy study, together with the first-principle calculations on the electronic band structure, reveals that the abrupt enhancement of the electrical resistivity anisotropy at T ≤ 100 K mainly arises from a sharp increase in the scattering rate anisotropy at low temperatures. More interestingly, the R_c /R_a of WP₂ at T = 10 K can be tuned from 8.0 to 10.6 as the magnetic field increases from 0 to 9 T. The so-far-strongest and magnetic-field-tunable electrical resistivity anisotropy found in WP₂ can serve as a degree of freedom for tuning the electrical properties of type-II WSMs, which paves the way for the development of novel electronic applications based on type-II WSMs.