Extremely high magnetoresistance and conductivity in the type-II Weyl semimetals WP₂ and MoP₂

The peculiar band structure of semimetals exhibiting Dirac and Weyl crossings can lead to spectacular electronic properties such as large mobilities accompanied by extremely high magnetoresistance. In particular, two closely neighboring Weyl points of the same chirality are protected from annihilation by structural distortions or defects, thereby significantly reducing the scattering probability between them. Here we present the electronic properties of the transition metal diphosphides, WP₂ and MoP₂, which are type-II Weyl semimetals with robust Weyl points by transport, angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy and first principles calculations. Our single crystals of WP₂ display an extremely low residual low-temperature resistivity of 3 n cm accompanied by an enormous and highly anisotropic magnetoresistance above 200 million % at 63 T and 2.5 K. We observe a large suppression of charge carrier backscattering in WP₂ from transport measurements. These properties are likely a consequence of the novel Weyl fermions expressed in this compound.