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A quantum magnet with a topological twist

Posted By Graphene Council, The Graphene Council, Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Updated: Tuesday, March 19, 2019


The team also showed that placing the kagome magnet in a high magnetic field causes the direction of magnetism to reverse. This "negative magnetism" is akin to having a compass that points south instead of north, or a refrigerator magnet that suddenly refuses to stick.

"We have been searching for super-massive 'flat-band' electrons that can still conduct electricity for a long time, and finally we have found them," said M. Zahid Hasan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University, who led the team. "In this system, we also found that due to an internal quantum phase effect, some electrons line up opposite to the magnetic field, producing negative magnetism."



In the kagome layer, the cobalt atoms form triangles around a hexagon with a tin atom in the center. This geometry forces the electrons into some uncomfortable positions -- leading this type of material to be called a "frustrated magnet."






Indeed, in the current study, when the researchers applied a strong magnetic field, some of the kagome magnet's electrons pointed in the opposite direction.

"Whether the field was applied up or down, the electrons' energy flipped in the same direction, that was the first thing that was strange in terms of the experiments," said Songtian Sonia Zhang, a graduate student in physics and one of three co-first-authors on the paper.

"That puzzled us for about three months," said Jia-Xin Yin, a postdoctoral research associate and another co-first author on the study. "We were searching for the reason, and with our collaborators we realized that this was the first experimental evidence that this flat band peak in the kagome lattice has a negative magnetic moment."

The researchers found that the negative magnetism arises due to the relationship between the kagome flat band, a quantum phenomenon called spin-orbit coupling, magnetism and a quantum factor called the Berry curvature field. Spin-orbit coupling refers to a situation where an electron's spin, which itself is a quantum property of electrons, becomes linked to the electron's orbital rotation. The combination of spin-orbital coupling and the magnetic nature of the material leads all the electrons to behave in lock step, like a giant single particle.


Two-dimensional patterned lattices can have other desirable types of electron conductance. For example, graphene is a pattern of carbon atoms that has generated considerable interest for its electronic applications over the past two decades. The kagome lattice's band structure gives rise to electrons that behave similarly to those in graphene.

Tags:  Graphene  M. Zahid Hasan  Princeton University  Songtian Sonia Zhang 

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