High-Temperature Quantum Anomalous Hall Insulators in Lithium-Decorated Iron-Based Superconductor Materials

TL;DR

This study predicts high-temperature quantum anomalous Hall insulators in lithium-decorated iron-based superconductors, revealing potential for room-temperature topological quantum devices through first-principles calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a family of stable 2D lithium-decorated iron-based materials exhibiting large-gap QAH states and high-temperature ferromagnetism, a novel advancement over previous low-temperature QAH systems.

Findings

Predicted room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors.

Identified large-gap QAH insulators with multiple chiral edge modes.

Discovered a 3D QAH phase with numerous chiral channels.

Abstract

Quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) insulator is the key material to study emergent topological quantum effects, but its ultralow working temperature limits experiments. Here, by first-principles calculations, we find a family of stable two-dimensional (2D) structures generated by lithium decoration of layered iron-based superconductor materials FeX (X = S, Se, Te), and predict room-temperature ferromagnetic semiconductors together with large-gap high-Chern-number QAH insulators in the 2D materials. The extremely robust ferromagnetic order is induced by the electron injection from Li to Fe and stabilized by strong ferromagnetic kinetic exchange in the 2D Fe layer. While in the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC), the ferromagnetism polarizes the system into a half Dirac semimetal state protected by mirror symmetry, the SOC effect results in a spontaneous breaking of mirror symmetry and introduces a Dirac mass term, which creates QAH states with sizable gaps (several tens of meV) and multiple chiral edge modes. We also find a 3D QAH insulator phase featured by macroscopic number of chiral conduction channels in bulk LiOH-LiFeX. The findings open new opportunities to realize novel QAH physics and applications at high temperatures.