Turning ZrTe5 into semiconductor through atomic intercalation

Abstract

In this work, we use the liquid ammonia method to successfully intercalate potassium atoms into ZrTe5 single crystal, and find a transition from semimetal to semiconductor at low temperature in the intercalated ZrTe5. The resistance anomalous peak is gradually suppressed and finally disappears with increasing potassium concentration. Whilst, the according sign reversal is always observed in the Hall resistance measurement. We tentatively attribute the semimetal-semiconductor transition to the lattice expansion induced by atomic intercalation and thereby a larger energy band gap.

16 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Superconducting Phases in Potassium-Intercalated Iron Selenides
• Evidence for a Strong Topological Insulator Phase in $\mathrm{ZrT}{\mathrm{e}}_5$
• Weak antilocalization and localization in disordered and interacting Weyl semimetals
• Spectroscopic evidence for bulk-band inversion and three-dimensional massive Dirac fermions in ZrTe5
• Superconductivity in Potassium-intercalated Td-WTe2
• Thermodynamic signatures for the existence of Dirac electrons in ZrTe5