Large unsaturated positive and negative magnetoresistance in Weyl semimetal TaP

After successfully growing single-crystal TaP, we measured its longitudinal resistivity (ρ xx ) and Hall resistivity (ρ yx ) at magnetic fields up to 9 T in the temperature range of 2-300 K. At 8 T, the magnetoresistance (MR) reached 3.28 × 105% at 2 K, 176% at 300 K. Neither value appeared saturated. We confirmed that TaP is a hole-electron compensated semimetal with a low carrier concentration and high hole mobility of μ h=3.71 × 105 cm2/V s, and found that a magnetic-field-induced metal-insulator transition occurs at room temperature. Remarkably, because a magnetic field (H) was applied in parallel to the electric field (E), a negative MR due to a chiral anomaly was observed and reached -3000% at 9 T without any sign of saturation, either, which is in contrast to other Weyl semimetals (WSMs). The analysis of the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations superimposed on the MR revealed that a nontrivial Berry’s phase with a strong offset of 0.3958, which is the characteristic feature of charge carriers enclosing a Weyl node. These results indicate that TaP is a promising candidate not only for revealing fundamental physics of the WSM state but also for some novel applications.