Spin-orbit quantum impurity and quantization in a topological magnet
Abstract
Quantum states induced by single-atomic impurities are at the frontier of physics and material science. While such states have been reported in high-temperature superconductors and dilute magnetic semiconductors, they are unexplored in topological magnets which can feature spin-orbit tunability. Here we use spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) to study the engineered quantum impurity in a topological magnet Co3Sn2S2. We find that each substituted In impurity introduces a striking localized bound state. Our systematic magnetization-polarized probe reveals that this bound state is spin-down polarized, in lock with a negative orbital magnetization. Moreover, the magnetic bound states of neighboring impurities interact to form quantized orbitals, exhibiting an intriguing spin-orbit splitting, analogous to the splitting of the topological fermion line. Our work collectively demonstrates the strong spin-orbit effect of the single-atomic impurity at the quantum level, suggesting that a nonmagnetic impurity can introduce spin-orbit coupled magnetic resonance in topological magnets.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2007.13738,
title = {Spin-orbit quantum impurity and quantization in a topological magnet},
author = {Jia-Xin Yin and Nana Shumiya and Yuxiao Jiang and Huibin Zhou and Gennevieve Macam and Hano Omar Mohammad Sura and Songtian S. Zhang and Zijia Cheng and Zurab Guguchia and Yangmu Li and Qi Wang and Maksim Litskevich and Ilya Belopolski and Xian Yang and Tyler A. Cochran and Guoqing Chang and Qi Zhang and Zhi-Quan Huang and Feng-Chuan Chuang and Hsin Lin and Hechang Lei and Brian M. Andersen and Ziqiang Wang and Shuang Jia and M. Zahid Hasan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.13738},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
To appear in Nature Communications (2020), both experiment and theory included. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2002.11783