Magnetoresistance and Kondo Effect in Nodal-Line Semimetal VAs2 * *Supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0300402), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 12074335 and 11974095), the Zhejiang Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. LY16A040012), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

Abstract

We performed calculations of the electronic band structure and the Fermi surface, measured the longitudinal resistivity ρxx (T,H), Hall resistivity ρxy (T,H), and magnetic susceptibility as a function of temperature at various magnetic fields for VAs2 with a monoclinic crystal structure. The band structure calculations show that VAs2 is a nodal-line semimetal when spin-orbit coupling is ignored. The emergence of a minimum at around 11 K in ρxx (T) measured at H = 0 demonstrates that some additional magnetic impurities (V4+, S = 1/2) exist in VAs2 single crystals, inducing Kondo scattering, evidenced by both the fitting of ρxx (T) data and the susceptibility measurements. It is found that a large positive magnetoresistance (MR) reaching 649% at 10 K and 9 T, its nearly quadratic field dependence, and a field-induced up-turn behavior of ρxx (T) also emerge in VAs2, although MR is not so large due to the existence of additional scattering compared with other topological nontrivial/trivial semimetals. The observed properties are attributed to a perfect charge-carrier compensation, which is evidenced by both the calculations relying on the Fermi surface and the Hall resistivity measurements. These results indicate that the compounds containing V (3d 3 4s 2) element can be as a platform for studying the influence of magnetic impurities to the topological properties.