Electronic properties of the type-II Dirac Semimetal PtTe2 probed through Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES)

A material’s crystal structure imparts constraints on the momentum and energy of the electrons in the crystal, forming an electronic band structure with potentially interesting topological properties. This is the case of PtTe2, a semimetal where band crossings lead to type-II bulk Dirac excitations, consequence of the violation of Lorentz invariance, and confirmed by previous ARPES studies.

In this work, we performed ARPES experiments on multiple PtTe 2 samples using a synchrotron source with a wide range of photon energies and light polarizations. We observe previously unseen band crossings and features, and by comparing the photoemission at different light polarizations contrasted with theoretical calculations, we gain further insight on the nature of the observed band structure.