First principles investigation of topological phase in XMR material TmSb under hydrostatic pressure

Abstract

In this article, we report emergence of topological phase in extremely large magnetoresistance (XMR) material TmSb under hydrostatic pressure using first principles calculations. We find that TmSb, a topologically trivial semimetal, undergoes a topological phase transition with band inversion at X point without breaking any symmetry under a hydrostatic pressure of 12 GPa. At 15 GPa, it again becomes topologically trivial with band inversion at Γ as well as X point. We find that the pressures corresponding to the topological phase transitions are far below the pressure corresponding to structural phase transition at 25.5 GPa. The reentrant behaviour of topological quantum phase with hydrostatic pressure would help in finding a correlation between topology and XMR effects through experiments.