Disorder-driven Weyl-Kondo semimetal phase in WTe2

Abstract

In this Letter, we report the observation of disorder-driven anisotropic Kondo-like screening and spontaneous Hall effect in bulk WTe₂, a nonmagnetic type-II Weyl semimetal. We show that Kondo-like scattering emerges more prominently in disordered samples and produces a magnetoresistive correction that is strongly anisotropic with respect to both current and magnetic field orientation, consistent with the underlying type-II Weyl dispersion. Strikingly, we find a spontaneous Hall effect in zero magnetic field, whose magnitude is enhanced with disorder, together with a large second-harmonic Hall signal exhibiting quadratic current scaling. We argue that Berry curvature–driven nonequilibrium transport, with the disorder-driven Kondo-like interaction pinning the Fermi level near the Weyl nodes, could possibly account for both the second-order and spontaneous Hall responses. These findings suggest the possibility of disorder acting as an effective control knob for inducing correlated topological phases in weakly correlated Weyl semimetals.