Extremely large non-saturating magnetoresistance has recently been reported for a large number of both topologically trivial and non-trivial materials. Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain the observed magnetotransport properties, yet without arriving to definitive conclusions or portraying a global picture. In this work, we investigate the transverse magnetoresistance of materials by combining the Fermi surfaces calculated from first principles with the Boltzmann transport theory approach relying on the semiclassical model and the relaxation time approximation. We first consider a series of simple model Fermi surfaces to provide a didactic introduction into the charge-carrier compensation and open-orbit mechanisms leading to non-saturating magnetoresistance. We then address in detail magnetotransport in three representative materials: (i) copper, a prototypical nearly free-electron metal characterized by the open Fermi surface that results in an intricate angular magnetoresistance, (ii) bismuth, a topologically trivial semimetal in which very large magnetoresistance is known to result from charge-carrier compensation, and (iii) tungsten diphosphide WP2, a recently discovered type-II Weyl semimetal that holds the record of magnetoresistance in compounds. In all three cases our calculations show excellent agreement with both the field dependence of magnetoresistance and its anisotropy measured at low temperatures. Furthermore, the calculations allow for a full interpretation of the observed features in terms of the Fermi surface topology. These results will help addressing a number of outstanding questions, such as the role of the topological phase in the pronounced large non-saturating magnetoresistance observed in topological materials.

Reference: Magnetoresistance from Fermi Surface Topology, ShengNan Zhang, QuanSheng Wu, Yi Liu, Oleg V. Yazyev
 arXiv:1808.08178

Introduction：
Dr. QuanSheng Wu obtained his Bachelor (2008) from Beijing normal university and PhD degree (2013) from Institute of Physics, CAS . After that, he worked one year in the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics as a research assistant. Then he worked as a postdoc in ETHZ during 2015-2017 and in EPFL from 2018 till now. As a computational physicist, he has been working on the topological materials since his PhD. The open-source software WannierTools that he developed is worldwide used and cited over 100 times since 2018.