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Abstract

We investigated transport, magnetotransport, and broadband optical properties of the half-Heusler compound YbPtBi. Hall measurements evidence two types of charge carriers: highly mobile electrons with a temperature-dependent concentration and low-mobile holes; their concentration stays almost constant within the investigated temperature range from 2.5 to 300 K. The optical spectra (10 meV-2.7 eV) can be naturally decomposed into contributions from intra- and interband absorption processes, the former manifesting themselves as two Drude bands with very different scattering rates, corresponding to the charges with different mobilities. These results of the optical measurements allow us to separate the contributions from electrons and holes to the total conductivity and to implement a two-channel-conduction model for description of the magnetotransport data. In this approach, the electron and hole mobilities are found to be around 50 000 and 10 cm(2)/V s at the lowest temperatures (2.5 K), respectively.