Anisotropic electric transport in UOX (X = S, Se, Te)

Opletal, P.  ; 酒井 宏典   ; 芳賀 芳範   ; 常盤 欣文  ; 山本 悦嗣  ; 神戸 振作  ; 徳永 陽  

Opletal, P.; Sakai, Hironori; Haga, Yoshinori; Tokiwa, Yoshifumi; Yamamoto, Etsuji; Kambe, Shinsaku; Tokunaga, Yo

Magnetic semimetals are currently focus of research due to possible electronic topological features. Topological features originate from nontrivial band characters. One of the most interesting state is Weyl fermion which originate from band splitting driven by spin-orbit interaction due to the inversion symmetry breaking or time-reversal symmetry breaking. The materials with these properties are called Weyl semimetals. Wey fermions are expected to be robust and have high mobility, which is important for practical application of topological matter. Uranium materials are interesting candidates for Weyl semimetals because of their strong spin-orbit interaction causing band inversion and/or strong electronic correlations, often observed as 5f magnetism. One of the possible candidates are UOX (X = S, Se, Te) compounds. We measured electric resistivity of UOX using Montgomery method. The resistivity along a-axis shows metallic/semi-metallic behavior in whole temperature region while resistivity in along the c-axis shows dramatic increase below T. We will discuss possible origin of this increase in relation to crystal and band structure.