Moir\'e semiconductors built on angle-aligned transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterobilayers provide a physical realization of the Kondo lattice model, in which one TMD layer is prepared in a Mott insulating state supporting a lattice of local magnetic moments and the other layer in a metallic state supporting itinerant carriers. The artificial Kondo lattice enables the exploration of exotic states of matter near a continuously tunable Kondo breakdown. Here we report the emergence of a symmetry-broken Chern insulator at a moir\'e hole filling factor 4/3 in angle-aligned MoTe2/WSe2 moir\'e bilayers, which realize a chiral Kondo lattice. The symmetry-broken Chern insulator, which exhibits integer quantized Hall conductance at a fractional moir\'e filling, breaks the translational symmetry of the lattice spontaneously; it also appears only near a magnetic field-induced Kondo breakdown in the mixed-valence regime of the material. We further demonstrate that the magnetic field required to induce the Kondo breakdown and to stabilize the symmetry-broken Chern insulator is twist angle dependent. The results present new opportunities for exploring the subtle interplay between topology and Kondo interactions in moir\'e semiconductors.
@article{arxiv.2602.17349,
title = {Emergence of a symmetry-broken Chern insulator near a moir\'e Kondo breakdown},
author = {Wanghao Tian and Bowen Shen and Lizhong Li and Mingjie Zhang and Feng Liu and Chushan Li and Yaotian Liu and Fan Xu and Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi and Peiling Li and Li Lu and Yang Xu and Shengwei Jiang and Tingxin Li and Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.17349},
year = {2026}
}