Realization of an Intrinsic Ferromagnetic Topological State in MnBi8Te13
Scientific Achievement
It is shown that the material MnBi8Te13, formed as a heterostructure consisting of [MnTe] and [Bi2Te3] blocks, is an intrinsic ferromagnetic axion insulator.
Significance and Impact
Axion insulating materials may support quantized magnetoelectric coupling and Majorana edge modes, and therefore hold promise for use in novel technologies, for example quantum computing.
Research Details
- Powder X-ray diffraction and scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) were used to determine the crystal structure.
- First-principle calculations and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) were used to determine the materials band structure and surface states.
- Single crystal neutron diffraction was used to determine the stacking structure, site disorder and ferromagnetic nature of the single crystal MnBi8Te13.
“Realization of an intrinsic ferromagnetic topological state in MnBi8Te13”
Chaowei Hu, Lei Ding, Kyle N. Gordon, Barun Ghosh, Hung-Ju Tien, Haoxiang Li, A. Garrison Linn, Shang-Wei Lien, Cheng-Yi Huang, Scott Mackey, Jinyu Liu, P. V. Sreenivasa Reddy, Bahadur Singh Amit Agarwal, Arun Bansil, Miao Song, Dongsheng Li, Su-Yang Xu, Hsin Lin, Huibo Cao, Tay-Rong Chang Dan Dessau and Ni Ni,
Science Advances, 6, eaba4275 (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba4275
