Colossal Room-Temperature Terahertz Topological Response in Type-II Weyl Semimetal NbIrTe4

Jiantian Zhang; Tianning Zhang; Luo Yan; Chao Zhu; Wanfu Shen; Chunguang Hu; Hongxiang Lei; Heng Luo; Daohua Zhang; Fucai Liu; Zheng Liu; Jinchao Tong; Liujiang Zhou; Peng Yu; Guowei Yang

doi:10.1002/adma.202204621

Colossal Room-Temperature Terahertz Topological Response in Type-II Weyl Semimetal NbIrTe₄

Adv Mater. 2022 Oct;34(42):e2204621. doi: 10.1002/adma.202204621. Epub 2022 Sep 22.

Authors

Jiantian Zhang¹, Tianning Zhang², Luo Yan³, Chao Zhu⁴, Wanfu Shen⁵, Chunguang Hu⁵, Hongxiang Lei¹, Heng Luo⁶, Daohua Zhang², Fucai Liu³, Zheng Liu⁴, Jinchao Tong², Liujiang Zhou³, Peng Yu¹, Guowei Yang¹

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Flexible Electronic Materials and Wearable Devices, Nanotechnology Research Center, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, P. R. China.
² School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
³ School of Physics, School of Optoelectronic Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 610054, P. R. China.
⁴ School of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore, 639798, Singapore.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Precision Measuring Technology and Instruments, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, P. R. China.
⁶ School of Physics and Electronics, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, P. R. China.

PMID: 36043902
DOI: 10.1002/adma.202204621

Abstract

The electromagnetic spectrum between microwave and infrared light is termed the "terahertz (THz) gap," of which there is an urgent lack of feasible and efficient room-temperature (RT) THz detectors. Type-II Weyl semimetals (WSMs) have been predicted to host significant RT topological photoresponses in low-frequency regions, especially in the THz gap, well addressing the shortcomings of THz detectors. However, such devices have not been experimentally realized yet. Herein, a type-II WSM (NbIrTe₄ ) is selected to fabricate THz detector, which exhibits a photoresponsivity of 5.7 × 10⁴ V W^-1 and a one-year air stability at RT. Such excellent THz-detection performance can be attributed to the topological effect of type-II WSM in which the effective mass of photogenerated electrons can be reduced by the large tilting angle of Weyl nodes to further improve mobility and photoresponsivity. Impressively, this device shows a giant intrinsic anisotropic conductance (σ_max /σ_min = 339) and THz response (I_ph-max /I_ph-min = 40.9), both of which are record values known. The findings open a new avenue for the realization of uncooled and highly sensitive THz detectors by exploring type-II WSM-based devices.

Keywords: anisotropy; terahertz detectors; type-II Weyl semimetals.

Abstract

Grants and funding