Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Nature. 2018 Mar 29;555(7698):638-642. doi: 10.1038/nature25987. Epub 2018 Mar 19.
The kagome lattice is a two-dimensional network of corner-sharing triangles that is known to host exotic quantum magnetic states. Theoretical work has predicted that kagome lattices may also host Dirac electronic states that could lead to topological and Chern insulating phases, but these states have so far not been detected in experiments. Here we study the d-electron kagome metal FeSn, which is designed to support bulk massive Dirac fermions in the presence of ferromagnetic order. We observe a temperature-independent intrinsic anomalous Hall conductivity that persists above room temperature, which is suggestive of prominent Berry curvature from the time-reversal-symmetry-breaking electronic bands of the kagome plane. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we observe a pair of quasi-two-dimensional Dirac cones near the Fermi level with a mass gap of 30 millielectronvolts, which correspond to massive Dirac fermions that generate Berry-curvature-induced Hall conductivity. We show that this behaviour is a consequence of the underlying symmetry properties of the bilayer kagome lattice in the ferromagnetic state and the atomic spin-orbit coupling. This work provides evidence for a ferromagnetic kagome metal and an example of emergent topological electronic properties in a correlated electron system. Our results provide insight into the recent discoveries of exotic electronic behaviour in kagome-lattice antiferromagnets and may enable lattice-model realizations of fractional topological quantum states.
菱方晶格是一种由共享顶角的三角形构成的二维网络,已知其具有奇异的量子磁态。理论工作预测,菱方晶格也可能存在狄拉克电子态,从而导致拓扑和陈绝缘体相,但这些态迄今尚未在实验中被探测到。在这里,我们研究了设计成在铁磁序存在时支持体相大量狄拉克费米子的 d 电子菱方金属 FeSn。我们观察到温度无关的本征反常霍尔电导率,其在室温以上仍然存在,这表明菱方平面的时间反演对称破缺能带具有显著的贝里曲率。通过角分辨光发射谱,我们在费米能级附近观察到一对具有 30 毫电子伏特能隙的准二维狄拉克锥,其对应于产生贝里曲率诱导的霍尔电导率的大量狄拉克费米子。我们表明,这种行为是铁磁菱方晶格在铁磁态下的基本对称性质和原子自旋轨道耦合的结果。这项工作为铁磁菱方金属提供了证据,并为关联电子系统中出现的拓扑电子性质提供了一个范例。我们的结果为菱方晶格反铁磁体中奇异电子行为的最近发现提供了见解,并可能实现分数拓扑量子态的晶格模型实现。