Since the initial discovery of two-dimensional van der Waals (vdW) materials, significant effort has been made to incorporate the three properties of magnetism, band structure topology, and strong electron correlations − to leverage emergent quantum phenomena and expand their potential applications. However, the discovery of a single vdW material that intrinsically hosts all three ingredients has remained an outstanding challenge. Here we report the discovery of a Kondo-interacting topological antiferromagnet in the vdW 5f electron system UOTe. It has a high antiferromagnetic (AFM) transition temperature of 150 K, with a unique AFM configuration that breaks the combined parity and time reversal (PT) symmetry in an even number of layers while maintaining zero net magnetic moment. Our angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements reveal Dirac bands near the Fermi level, which combined with our theoretical calculations demonstrate UOTe as an AFM Dirac semimetal. Within the AFM order, we observed the presence of the Kondo interaction, as evidenced by the emergence of a 5f flat band near the Fermi level below 100 K and hybridization between the Kondo band and the Dirac band. Our density functional theory calculations in its bilayer form predict UOTe as a rare example of a fully-compensated AFM Chern insulator.
@article{arxiv.2411.08816,
title = {UOTe: Kondo-interacting topological antiferromagnet in a van der Waals lattice},
author = {Christopher Broyles and Sougata Mardanya and Mengke Liu and Junyeong Ahn and Thao Dinh and Gadeer Alqasseri and Jalen Garner and Zackary Rehfuss and Ken Guo and Jiahui Zhu and David Martinez and Du Li and Yiqing Hao and Huibo Cao and Matt Boswell and Weiwei Xie and Jeremy G. Philbrick and Tai Kong and Li Yang and Ashvin Vishwanath and Philip Kim and Su-Yang Xu and Jennifer E. Hoffman and Jonathan D. Denlinger and Sugata Chowdhury and Sheng Ran},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.08816},
year = {2024}
}