A van der Waals antiferromagnetic topological insulator with weak interlayer magnetic coupling

Chaowei Hu; Kyle N. Gordon; Pengfei Liu; Jinyu Liu; Xiaoqing Zhou; Peipei Hao; Dushyant Narayan; Eve Emmanouilidou; Hongyi Sun; Yuntian Liu; Harlan Brawer; Arthur P. Ramirez; Lei Ding; Huibo Cao; Qihang Liu; Dan Dessau; Ni Ni

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-13814-x

A van der Waals antiferromagnetic topological insulator with weak interlayer magnetic coupling

Chaowei Hu, Kyle N. Gordon, Pengfei Liu, Jinyu Liu, Xiaoqing Zhou, Peipei Hao, Dushyant Narayan, Eve Emmanouilidou, Hongyi Sun, Yuntian Liu, Harlan Brawer, Arthur P. Ramirez, Lei Ding, Huibo Cao, Qihang Liu, Dan Dessau, Ni Ni

Single Crystal Diffraction

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

202 Scopus citations

Abstract

Magnetic topological insulators (TI) provide an important material platform to explore quantum phenomena such as quantized anomalous Hall effect and Majorana modes, etc. Their successful material realization is thus essential for our fundamental understanding and potential technical revolutions. By realizing a bulk van der Waals material MnBi₄Te₇ with alternating septuple [MnBi₂Te₄] and quintuple [Bi₂Te₃] layers, we show that it is ferromagnetic in plane but antiferromagnetic along the c axis with an out-of-plane saturation field of ~0.22 T at 2 K. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements and first-principles calculations further demonstrate that MnBi₄Te₇ is a Z₂ antiferromagnetic TI with two types of surface states associated with the [MnBi₂Te₄] or [Bi₂Te₃] termination, respectively. Additionally, its superlattice nature may make various heterostructures of [MnBi₂Te₄] and [Bi₂Te₃] layers possible by exfoliation. Therefore, the low saturation field and the superlattice nature of MnBi₄Te₇ make it an ideal system to investigate rich emergent phenomena.

Original language	English
Article number	97
Journal	Nature Communications
Volume	11
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13814-x
State	Published - Dec 1 2020

Funding

We thank Paul C. Canfield, Quansheng Wu, Suyang Xu, Filip Ronning and Chris Regan for helpful discussions, and Chris Jozwiak and Roland Koch at the Advanced Light Source for experimental help. Work at UCLA and UCSC was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) under award number DE-SC0011978 and DE-SC0017862, respectively. Work at CU Boulder was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation-Division of Material Research under NSF-DMR-1534734. Work at SUSTech was supported by the NSFC under Grant No. 11874195, the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational Science and Material Design under Grant No. 2019B030301001, “Climbing Program” Special Funds under Grant No. pdjhb0448 and Center for Computational Science and Engineering of SUSTech. H.C. acknowledges the support from U.S. DOE BES Early Career Award KC0402010 under contract no. DE-AC05-00OR22725. This research used resources of the Advanced Light Source, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Funders	Funder number
CU Boulder
DOE Office of Science user facility
Office of Basic Energy Sciences	BES, DE-SC0011978, DE-SC0017862
U.S. DOE BES	KC0402010
U.S. National Science Foundation-Division of Material Research	NSF-DMR-1534734
National Science Foundation	1534734
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Science
University of California, Santa Cruz
University of California, Los Angeles
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Urology	2019B030301001
National Natural Science Foundation of China	11874195

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Hu, C., Gordon, K. N., Liu, P., Liu, J., Zhou, X., Hao, P., Narayan, D., Emmanouilidou, E., Sun, H., Liu, Y., Brawer, H., Ramirez, A. P., Ding, L., Cao, H., Liu, Q., Dessau, D., & Ni, N. (2020). A van der Waals antiferromagnetic topological insulator with weak interlayer magnetic coupling. Nature Communications, 11(1), Article 97. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13814-x

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abstract = "Magnetic topological insulators (TI) provide an important material platform to explore quantum phenomena such as quantized anomalous Hall effect and Majorana modes, etc. Their successful material realization is thus essential for our fundamental understanding and potential technical revolutions. By realizing a bulk van der Waals material MnBi4Te7 with alternating septuple [MnBi2Te4] and quintuple [Bi2Te3] layers, we show that it is ferromagnetic in plane but antiferromagnetic along the c axis with an out-of-plane saturation field of ~0.22 T at 2 K. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements and first-principles calculations further demonstrate that MnBi4Te7 is a Z2 antiferromagnetic TI with two types of surface states associated with the [MnBi2Te4] or [Bi2Te3] termination, respectively. Additionally, its superlattice nature may make various heterostructures of [MnBi2Te4] and [Bi2Te3] layers possible by exfoliation. Therefore, the low saturation field and the superlattice nature of MnBi4Te7 make it an ideal system to investigate rich emergent phenomena.",

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A van der Waals antiferromagnetic topological insulator with weak interlayer magnetic coupling

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