Material design with the van der Waals stacking of bismuth-halide chains realizing a higher-order topological insulator
Abstract
The van der Waals (vdW) materials with low dimensions have been extensively studied as a platform to generate exotic quantum properties. Advancing this view, a great deal of attention is currently paid to topological quantum materials with vdW structures. Here, we provide a new concept of designing topological materials by the vdW stacking of quantum spin Hall insulators (QSHIs). Most interestingly, a slight shift of inversion center in the unit cell caused by a modification of stacking is found to induce the topological variation from a trivial insulator to a higher-order topological insulator (HOTI). Based on that, we present the first experimental realization of a HOTI by investigating a bismuth bromide Bi4Br4 with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). The unique feature in bismuth halides capable of selecting various topology only by differently stacking chains, combined with the great advantage of the vdW structure, offers a fascinating playground for engineering topologically non-trivial edge-states toward future spintronics applications.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2002.01134,
title = {Material design with the van der Waals stacking of bismuth-halide chains realizing a higher-order topological insulator},
author = {Ryo Noguchi and Masaru Kobayashi and Zhanzhi Jiang and Kenta Kuroda and Takanari Takahashi and Zifan Xu and Daehun Lee and Motoaki Hirayama and Masayuki Ochi and Tetsuroh Shirasawa and Peng Zhang and Chun Lin and Cédric Bareille and Shunsuke Sakuragi and Hiroaki Tanaka and So Kunisada and Kifu Kurokawa and Koichiro Yaji and Ayumi Harasawa and Viktor Kandyba and Alessio Giampietri and Alexei Barinov and Timur K. Kim and Cephise Cacho and Makoto Hashimoto and Donghui Lu and Shik Shin and Ryotaro Arita and Keji Lai and Takao Sasagawa and Takeshi Kondo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.01134},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
Nature Materials, in press. The final version of this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-020-00871-7