Pursuing the high-temperature quantum anomalous Hall effect in MnBi2Te4/Sb2Te3 heterostructures

Shifei Qi, Ruiling Gao, Maozhi Chang, Yulei Han, and Zhenhua Qiao
Phys. Rev. B 101, 014423 – Published 15 January 2020

Abstract

Quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) has been experimentally realized in magnetically doped topological insulators or intrinsic magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4 by applying an external magnetic field. However, either the low observation temperature or the unexpected external magnetic field (tuning all MnBi2Te4 layers to be ferromagnetic) still hinders further application of QAHE. Here, we theoretically demonstrate that proper stacking of MnBi2Te4 and Sb2Te3 layers is able to produce intrinsically ferromagnetic van der Waals heterostructures to realize the high-temperature QAHE. We find that interlayer ferromagnetic transition can happen at TC=42K when a five-quintuple-layer Sb2Te3 topological insulator is inserted into two septuple-layer MnBi2Te4 with interlayer antiferromagnetic coupling. Band structure and topological property calculations show that MnBi2Te4/Sb2Te3/MnBi2Te4 heterostructure exhibits a topologically nontrivial band gap around 26 meV, that hosts a QAHE with a Chern number of C=1. In addition, our proposed materials system should be considered as an ideal platform to explore high-temperature QAHE due to the fact of natural charge compensation, originating from the intrinsic n-type defects in MnBi2Te4 and p-type defects in Sb2Te3.

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  • Received 2 August 2019
  • Revised 31 October 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.101.014423

©2020 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Shifei Qi1,2, Ruiling Gao3,1, Maozhi Chang3,1, Yulei Han2,*, and Zhenhua Qiao2,†

  • 1Department of Physics, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, Hebei 050024, China
  • 2ICQD, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, CAS Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics, and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
  • 3Institute of Materials Science, Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, Shanxi 041004, China

  • *Corresponding author: hanyulei@mail.ustc.edu.cn
  • Corresponding author: qiao@ustc.edu.cn

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Vol. 101, Iss. 1 — 1 January 2020

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