Magnetotransport properties of compensated semimetal HfB2 with high-density light carriers

摘要

We present a detailed magnetotransport study on HfB2, a possible topological nodal-line semimetal. HfB2 exhibits field-induced resistivity upturn and plateau behaviors at low temperature and high field, accompanying rather large magnetoresistance. The analysis of the field dependence of Hall and longitudinal resistivity shows that there are two kinds of carriers (electrons and holes) with almost same carrier concentrations and rather high mobilities in HfB2. Above field-induced phenomena can be well explained by using the two-band model with compensation condition. Even the carrier concentration is significantly high (similar to 1.8 x 10(21) cm(-3)) in HfB2, much larger than other known topological semimetals with discrete Dirac nodal points, the electron-type carriers still have relatively small effective masses. In contrast to ZrB2, the slightly increased effective mass in HfB2 manifests the effect of enhanced spin-orbit coupling due to the large atomic number of Hf.