Survival of Weyl topology under high pressure

Determine whether the Weyl topology survives in the high-pressure distorted regime of TaRhTe4 and other members of the TaXTe4 family.

Background

The paper establishes that pressure drives TaRhTe4 from an ambient-pressure orthorhombic structure toward a distorted orthorhombic regime while simultaneously reconstructing its low-energy electronic structure and inducing superconductivity. First-principles calculations indicate that additional electron-like bands cross the Fermi level and that the density of states at the Fermi level increases, but the calculations and measurements do not determine whether the Weyl-semimetal topology persists after the high-pressure structural distortion.

Resolving this issue would clarify whether superconductivity in pressurized TaRhTe4 and related TaXTe4 materials develops from a surviving topological electronic state or from a topologically trivial, pressure-reconstructed multiband metal.