Quantum oscillation study of the large magnetoresistance in Mo substituted WTe₂ single crystals

The list of interesting electrical properties exhibited by transition metal dichalcogenides has grown with the discovery of extremely large magnetoresistance (MR) and type-II Weyl semimetal behaviour in WTe₂ and MoTe₂. The extremely large MR in WTe₂ is still not adequately understood. Here, we systematically study the effect of Mo substitution on the quantum oscillations in the MR in WTe₂. The MR decreases with Mo substitution, however, the carrier concentrations extracted from the quantum oscillations show that the charge compensation improves. We believe that earlier interpretations based on the two-band theory, which attribute the decrease in MR to charge imbalance, could be incorrect due to over-parametrization. We attribute the decrease in MR in the presence of charge compensation to a fall in transport mobility, which is evident from the residual resistivity ratio data. The quantum scattering time and the effective masses do not change within experimental errors upon substitution.