Nonsaturating extreme magnetoresistance and large electronic magnetostriction in LuAs

J. Juraszek, Ł. Bochenek, A. Rudenko, M. M. Hosen, M. Daszkiewicz, Z. Wang, J. Wosnitza, Z. Henkie, M. Samsel-Czekała, M. Neupane, and T. Cichorek

Here, we address an unsaturated extreme magnetoresistance (XMR) with a marked deviation from the semiclassical B² behavior that is commonly credited to the presence of topologically protected electronic states. For the topologically trivial semimetal LuAs, we observe a nonsaturating XMR with a nonquadratic magnetic-field dependence gained up to nearly 60 T. Remarkably, this diamagnetic material exhibits a very large magnetostriction that provides solid evidence for a field-dependent variation of electron and hole concentrations. We show that an underlying strain-induced change in the charge-carrier densities can give rise to an unsaturated XMR even in a moderately imbalanced semimetal.