Magnetic kagome materials RETi3Bi4 family with weak interlayer interactions

TL;DR

This study introduces a new family of magnetic kagome materials RETi3Bi4 with weak interlayer interactions, enabling exfoliation into thin layers and exhibiting diverse magnetic orders, with potential for topological quantum phenomena.

Contribution

The paper reports the synthesis, magnetic characterization, and electronic structure analysis of RETi3Bi4 kagome materials, highlighting their weak interlayer interactions and magnetic properties, which are novel in this class.

Findings

Nanometer-thick flakes can be exfoliated due to weak interlayer interactions.

Distinct magnetic orders observed: ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism depending on RE element.

Electronic structures show kagome characteristic bands consistent with ARPES and calculations.

Abstract

Kagome materials have attracted a surge of research interest recently, especially for the ones combining with magnetism, and the ones with weak interlayer interactions which can fabricate thin devices. However, kagome materials combining both characters of magnetism and weak interlayer interactions are rare. Here we investigate a new family of titanium based kagome materials RETi3Bi4 (RE = Eu, Gd and Sm). The flakes of nanometer thickness of RETi3Bi4 can be obtained by exfoliation due to the weak interlayer interactions. According to magnetic measurements, out-of-plane ferromagnetism, out-of-plane anti-ferromagnetism, and in-plane ferromagnetism are formed for RE = Eu, Gd, and Sm respectively. The magnetic orders are simple and the saturation magnetizations can be relatively large since the rare earth elements solely provide the magnetic moments. Further by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and first-principles calculations, the electronic structures of RETi3Bi4 are investigated. The ARPES results are consistent with the calculations, indicating the bands characteristic with kagome sublattice in RETi3Bi4. We expect these materials to be promising candidates for observation of the exotic magnetic topological phases and the related topological quantum transport studies.