Intrinsic magnetic topological insulators in van der Waals layered MnBi2Te4-family materials

By Jiaheng Li, Yang Li, Shiqiao Du, Zun Wang, B. Gu, Shoucheng Zhang, K. He, Wenhui Duan, Yong Xu. Science Advances, 2018

994 citations recorded by the source corpus.

MnBi2Te4-related compounds can serve as a promising material platform for exploring exotic magnetic topological effects. The interplay of magnetism and topology is a key research subject in condensed matter physics, which offers great opportunities to explore emerging new physics, such as the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect, axion electrodynamics, and Majorana fermions. However, these exotic physical effects have rarely been realized experimentally because of the lack of suitable working materials. Here, we predict a series of van der Waals layered MnBi2Te4-related materials that show intralayer ferromagnetic and interlayer antiferromagnetic exchange interactions. We find extremely rich topological quantum states with outstanding characteristics in MnBi2Te4, including an antiferromagnetic topological insulator with the long-sought topological axion states on the surface, a type II magnetic Weyl semimetal with one pair of Weyl points, as well as a collection of intrinsic axion insulators and QAH insulators in even- and odd-layer films, respectively. These notable predictions, if proven experimentally, could profoundly change future research and technology of topological quantum physics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5515267c3ca0754faadc4c6a8bdd5112c3c5d40

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Chaoxing Liu
2. H. Ding
3. T. Qian
4. Cui-Zu Chang
5. Yu He
6. H. Weng
7. Zhi-xun Shen
8. Allan H. MacDonald

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Zhi-xun Shen
2. Allan H. MacDonald

In Materials Chemistry

1. H. Ding
2. Chaoxing Liu
3. T. Qian
4. Cui-Zu Chang
5. Yu He
6. H. Weng
7. Yuanfeng Xu
8. Zhi-xun Shen

Citations in the corpus

• Dirac Surface States in Intrinsic Magnetic Topological Insulators EuSn2As2 and MnBi2nTe3n+1 (2019, background): “Theory has predicted several intrinsic antiferromagnetic (AF) TIs, such as MnBi2Te4 [16,19-21,33,40] and EuIn2As2 [17], while most experimental studies focused on MnBi2Te4 [18,21,25-27,30-39].”
• Topological Electronic Structure and Its Temperature Evolution in Antiferromagnetic Topological Insulator MnBi2Te4 (2019, methodology): “Therefore, if the surface magnetism is ideally ordered along the out-of-plane z direction, a surface gap of ∼40 meV would develop, as indicated by theoretical calculations [16].”
• Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, positive): “A recent development which promises to shed light on this issue was the prediction of MnBi2Te4 as an antiferromagnetic TI (Li et al., 2019b; Otrokov et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019a), with the first published ARPES results reporting a gap of ∼ 100 meV (Lee et al., 2019; Vidal et al., 2019; Zeugner…”
• Colloquium : Quantum anomalous Hall effect (2022, methodology): “12(b)] (Li et al., 2019b; Otrokov et al., 2019a; Zhang et al., 2019a).”