School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA.
Nature. 2024 Apr;628(8008):522-526. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07214-5. Epub 2024 Mar 20.
Quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulators are two-dimensional electronic materials that have a bulk band gap similar to an ordinary insulator but have topologically protected pairs of edge modes of opposite chiralities. So far, experimental studies have found only integer QSH insulators with counter-propagating up-spins and down-spins at each edge leading to a quantized conductance G = e/h (with e and h denoting the electron charge and Planck's constant, respectively). Here we report transport evidence of a fractional QSH insulator in 2.1° twisted bilayer MoTe, which supports spin-S conservation and flat spin-contrasting Chern bands. At filling factor ν = 3 of the moiré valence bands, each edge contributes a conductance with zero anomalous Hall conductivity. The state is probably a time-reversal pair of the even-denominator 3/2-fractional Chern insulators. Furthermore, at ν = 2, 4 and 6, we observe a single, double and triple QSH insulator with each edge contributing a conductance G, 2G and 3G, respectively. Our results open up the possibility of realizing time-reversal symmetric non-abelian anyons and other unexpected topological phases in highly tunable moiré materials.
量子自旋霍尔(QSH)绝缘体是一种二维电子材料,其体带隙类似于普通绝缘体,但具有拓扑保护的一对相反手性的边缘模式。到目前为止,实验研究仅发现整数 QSH 绝缘体,每个边缘的上自旋和下自旋反向传播,导致电导量子化 G = e/h(其中 e 和 h 分别表示电子电荷和普朗克常数)。在这里,我们报告了在 2.1°扭曲双层 MoTe 中存在分数 QSH 绝缘体的输运证据,该绝缘体支持自旋 S 守恒和平坦自旋对比的陈能带。在莫尔价带的填充因子 ν = 3 时,每个边缘的电导为 ,反常霍尔电导率为零。该状态可能是偶数分母 3/2 分数陈绝缘体的时间反演对。此外,在 ν = 2、4 和 6 时,我们观察到单个、双个和三个 QSH 绝缘体,每个边缘的电导分别为 G、2G 和 3G。我们的结果为在高度可调的莫尔材料中实现时间反演对称的非阿贝尔任意子和其他意想不到的拓扑相开辟了可能性。