Origin of the turn-on temperature behavior in WTe${}_2$

Abstract

A hallmark of materials with extremely large magnetoresistance (XMR) is the transformative 'turn-on' temperature behavior: when the applied magnetic field $H$ is above certain value, the resistivity versus temperature $\ddot{I}(T)$ curve shows a minimum at a field dependent temperature $T^{\ast }$, which has been interpreted as a magnetic-field-driven metal-insulator transition or attributed to an electronic structure change. Here, we demonstrate that $\ddot{I}(T)$ curves with turn-on behavior in the newly discovered XMR material WTe${}_2$ can be scaled as MR $\sim (H/\ddot{I}{}_0{)}^m$ with $m\approx 2$ and $\ddot{I}{}_0$ being the resistivity at zero-field. We obtained experimentally and also derived from the observed scaling the magnetic field dependence of the turn-on temperature $T^{\ast }\sim (H-H_c{)}^{\hat{I}}½$ with $\hat{I}½\approx 1/2$, which was earlier used as evidence for a predicted metal-insulator transition. The scaling also leads to a simple quantitative expression for the resistivity $\ddot{I}{}^{\ast }\approx 2\ddot{I}{}_0$ at the onset of the XMR behavior, which fits the data remarkably well. These results exclude the possible existence of a magnetic-field-driven metal-insulator transition or significant contribution of an electronic structure change to the low-temperature XMR in WTe${}_2$. This work resolves the origin of the turn-on behavior observed in several XMR materials and also provides a general route for a quantitative understanding of the temperature dependence of MR in both XMR and non-XMR materials.