Room Temperature Nonlinear Hall Effect and Wireless RF Rectification in Weyl Semimetal TaIrTe4

Abstract

Energy – one of the major crises humanity is facing in today’s modern life. There is a great interest in developing micro-scaled devices that can generate electricity using ambient radiofrequency (RF) energy without the need of any bias or magnetic field. We addressed this problem and used the intrinsic quantum property of the Weyl semimetal to convert the RF energy into electricity. The whole process is wireless and there is no need for any external electrical bias (battery-free) and magnetic field. In this work, we report the room-temperature NLHE in a type-II Weyl semimetal TaIrTe4, which hosts a robust NLHE due to broken inversion symmetry and large band overlapping at the Fermi level. The NLHE is present only when the electric field is applied along the axis of the mirror plane (a-axis of the crystal). We also observe a temperature-induced sign inversion of NLHE in TaIrTe4. Finally, based on the observed room-temperature NLHE in TaIrTe4 we demonstrate the wireless RF rectification with zero external bias and magnetic field. As shown in Fig. 1(b), an incident electric field along a-axis (Ea) generates a rectified voltage along b-axis (Vb), whereas, there is no rectification when the incident electric field is along b-axis (Eb) in consistent with the symmetry constraints of NLHE. This work opens a door to realizing room temperature applications based on the NLHE in Weyl semimetals.