Large Thermopower with Sign-Alternating Quantum Oscillations in Insulating Monolayer WTe2

Abstract

The detection of Landau-level-like energy structures near the chemical potential of an insulator is essential to the search for a class of correlated electronic matter hosting charge-neutral fermions and Fermi surfaces, a long-proposed concept that remains elusive experimentally. Here we introduce and demonstrate that the magneto-thermoelectric response of a quantum insulator can reveal critical information not available via other approaches. We report the observation of large thermopower together with quantum oscillations (QOs) in the hole-doped insulating state of monolayer tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) in magnetic fields. The measured low temperature magneto-thermopower exceeds k_B/e by more than an order of magnitude, where k_B is the Boltzmann constant and e the elementary charge. This large thermopower is a characteristic of an insulating state, consistent with high resistivity. However, as the magnetic field is swept, QOs develop in the thermopower, which remarkably undergoes sign-changes that mimic the quantum characteristic of metals due to Landau quantization. The resistivity of the sample is orders of magnitude larger than the value expected from the QOs. The sign-change in the thermoelectric response directly implies the presence of a field-induced Landau-level-like structure at the chemical potential of the insulator. Neither the large thermopower nor the sign-changes can be induced by the metallic gate nearby. Our results demonstrate a new dilemma for investigating low energy excitations in correlated materials featuring mixed quantum characteristics of metals and insulators.