Two Dimensional Antiferromagnetic Chern Insulator NiRuCl6

TL;DR

This paper predicts that the two-dimensional antiferromagnetic NiRuCl6 can exhibit quantum anomalous Hall effect due to its topological band structure and strong spin-orbit coupling, offering a promising route for high-temperature QAHE.

Contribution

It introduces NiRuCl6 as a new AFM Chern insulator with potential for high-temperature QAHE, based on DFT and Berry curvature calculations.

Findings

NiRuCl6 exhibits topological band reversal leading to QAHE.

AFM Chern insulator is more suitable for high-temperature QAHE.

Strong SOC and spin-polarized structure are key to QAHE in NiRuCl6.

Abstract

Based on DFT and Berry curvature calculations, we predict that quantum anomalous hall effect (QAHE) can be realized in two dimensional anti-ferromagnetic (AFM) NiRuCl6 with zero net magnetic moment. By tuning spin-orbits coupling (SOC), we find that the topological properties of NiRuCl6 come from its energy band reversal. The results indicate that NiRuCl6 behaves as AFM Chern insulator and its spin-polarized electronic structure and strong spin-orbits coupling (SOC) are the origin of QAHE. Considering the compatibility between AFM and insulator, AFM Chern insulator is more suitable to realize high temperature QAHE because generally Neel temperature of AFM systems is more easily improved than Curie temperature of ferromagnetic (FM) systems. Due to the different magnetic coupling mechanism between FM and AFM Chern insulator, AFM Chern insulator provides a new way to archive high temperature QAHE in experiments.