In October 2014, tungsten ditelluride was discovered to exhibit an extremely large magnetoresistance: 13 million percent resistance increase in a magnetic field of 60 tesla at 0.5 kelvin.

[7] It has also been reported that terahertz-frequency light pulses can switch the crystal structure of WTe2 between orthorhombic and monoclinic by altering the material's atomic lattice.

It was later shown with transport measurements that, below 50K, a single layer of WTe2 instead acts like an insulator but with an offset current independent of doping by a local electrostatic gate.

[10][11] Identical measurements with two- and three-layer thick samples showed the expected semimetallic response.

Subsequent studies using other techniques have been consistent with the transport results, including those using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy[12][13] and microwave-impedance microscopy.