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Giant anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnetic kagome-lattice semimetal

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 1125–1131 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Magnetic Weyl semimetals with broken time-reversal symmetry are expected to generate strong intrinsic anomalous Hall effects, due to their large Berry curvature. Here, we report a magnetic Weyl semimetal candidate, Co3Sn2S2, with a quasi-two-dimensional crystal structure consisting of stacked kagome lattices. This lattice provides an excellent platform for hosting exotic topological quantum states. We observe a negative magnetoresistance that is consistent with the chiral anomaly expected from the presence of Weyl fermions close to the Fermi level. The anomalous Hall conductivity is robust against both increased temperature and charge conductivity, which corroborates the intrinsic Berry-curvature mechanism in momentum space. Owing to the low carrier density in this material and the considerably enhanced Berry curvature from its band structure, the anomalous Hall conductivity and the anomalous Hall angle simultaneously reach 1,130 Ω−1 cm−1 and 20%, respectively, an order of magnitude larger than typical magnetic systems. Combining the kagome-lattice structure and the long-range out-of-plane ferromagnetic order of Co3Sn2S2, we expect that this material is an excellent candidate for observation of the quantum anomalous Hall state in the two-dimensional limit.

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Fig. 1: Crystal and electronic structures of Co3Sn2S2 and the measured electric resistivity.
Fig. 2: Theoretical calculations of the Berry curvature and anomalous Hall conductivity.
Fig. 3: Chiral-anomaly-induced negative magnetoresistance.
Fig. 4: Transport measurements of the AHE.
Fig. 5: Transport measurements of the anomalous Hall angle.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (No. 291472) ‘IDEA Heusler!’ and ERC Advanced Grant (No. 742068) ‘TOPMAT’. E.L. acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany for his Fellowship and from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for his Excellent Young Scholarship (No. 51722106).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, Dresden, Germany

    Enke Liu, Yan Sun, Nitesh Kumar, Aili Sun, Lin Jiao, Qiunan Xu, Johannes Kroder, Vicky Süß, Horst Borrmann, Chandra Shekhar, Walter Schnelle, Steffen Wirth & Claudia Felser

  2. Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Enke Liu & Wenhong Wang

  3. Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Lukas Muechler

  4. Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany

    Shuo-Ying Yang & Defa Liu

  5. School of Physical Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China

    Aiji Liang & Yulin Chen

  6. Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Aiji Liang

  7. High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, China

    Zhaosheng Wang & Chuanying Xi

  8. Clarendon Laboratory, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Yulin Chen

  9. Institut für Festkörper- und Material Physik, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Sebastian T. B. Goennenwein

Authors
  1. Enke Liu
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Contributions

The project was conceived by E.L. and C.F. Single crystals were grown by E.L., who performed the structural, magnetic and transport measurements with assistance from A.S., J.K., S.Y., V.S., H.B., N.K. and W.S. The STM characterizations were performed by L.J. and S.W. The ARPES measurements were conducted by D.L., A.L. and Y.C. The static high-magnetic-field measurements were performed and analysed by Z.W., C.X., N.K., C.S. and L.J. The theoretical calculations were carried out by Y.S., L.M., Q.X. and E.L. All the authors discussed the results. The paper was written by E.L., Y.S. and S.T.B.G. with feedback from all the authors. The project was supervised by C.F.

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Correspondence to Enke Liu, Yan Sun or Claudia Felser.

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Supplementary figures S1 to S15, Supplementary tables S1 to S4, Supplementary references 1 to 31

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Liu, E., Sun, Y., Kumar, N. et al. Giant anomalous Hall effect in a ferromagnetic kagome-lattice semimetal. Nature Phys 14, 1125–1131 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0234-5

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