Published January 10, 2024 | Version v1
Journal article

Orbital Chern insulator at ν=2 in twisted MoTe2

  • 1. Department of Physics, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
  • 2. HKU-UCAS Joint Institute of Theoretical and Computational Physics at Hong Kong, China
  • 3. Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

Description

In twisted MoTe2, the latest transport measurement has reported observation of the quantum anomalous Hall effect at hole filling ν=1, which undergoes a topological phase transition to a trivial ferromagnet as layer hybridization gets suppressed by interlayer bias D. Here we show that this underlies the existence of an orbital Chern insulating state with gate (D) switchable sign in an antiferromagnetic spin background at hole filling ν=2. From momentum-space Hartree-Fock calculations, we find this state has a topological phase diagram complementary to that of the ν=1 one: by sweeping D from negative to positive, the Chern number of this ν=2 state can be switched between +1, 0, and 1, accompanied by a sign change of a sizable orbital magnetization. In the range of D where this antiferromagnet is the ground state, the orbital magnetization allows magnetic field initialization of the spin antiferromagnetic order and the Chern number.

Additional details

Identifiers

DOI
10.1103/PhysRevB.109.L041403;
arXiv
arXiv:2308.11454;
Crossref Funder ID
10.13039/501100012166; 10.13039/501100004733;

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review B
Journal Volume
109
Journal Issue
4
Journal Page Range
5 pgs.
ISSN
1550-235X

Optional Information

Copyright
©2024 American Physical Society
Contract/Grant/Project number
2020YFA0309600; HKU SRFS2122-7S05; AoE/P-701/20
Notes
These authors contributed equally to this work.; Contact Email: wangyao@hku.hk; Record automatically processed
Funding organization
National Key Research and Development Program of China; Universidade de Macau; Research Grant Council of Hong Kong SAR China; New Cornerstone Science Foundation