Spin-Triplet Excitonic Insulator in the Ultra-Quantum Limit of HfTe5

TL;DR

This paper reports the experimental discovery of a spin-triplet excitonic insulator in HfTe5 under ultra-quantum conditions, revealing a new state with potential for advanced spin transport phenomena.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence of a spin-triplet excitonic insulator in a three-dimensional topological material, expanding understanding of excitonic phases.

Findings

Observation of a 250 μeV gap indicating exciton formation

Identification of spin-triplet pairing with opposite spins

Zero Hall conductivity over a wide magnetic field range

Abstract

More than fifty years ago, excitonic insulators, formed by the pairing of electrons and holes due to Coulomb interactions, were first predicted. Since then, excitonic insulators have been observed in various classes of materials, including quantum Hall bilayers, graphite, transition metal chalcogenides, and more recently in moire superlattices. In these excitonic insulators, an electron and a hole with the same spin bind together and the resulting exciton is a spin singlet. Here, we report the experimental observation of a spin-triplet exciton insulator in the ultra-quantum limit of a three-dimensional topological material HfTe5. We observe that the spin-polarized zeroth Landau bands, dispersing along the field direction, cross each other beyond a characteristic magnetic field in HfTe5, forming the one-dimensional Weyl mode. Transport measurements reveal the emergence of a gap of about 250 {\mu}eV when the field surpasses a critical threshold. By performing the material-specific modeling, we identify this gap as a consequence of a spin-triplet exciton formation, where electrons and holes with opposite spin form bound states, and the translational symmetry is preserved. The system reaches charge neutrality following the gap opening, as evidenced by the zero Hall conductivity over a wide magnetic field range (10 - 72 T). Our finding of the spin-triplet excitonic insulator paves the way for studying novel spin transport including spin superfluidity, spin Josephson currents, and Coulomb drag of spin currents in analogy to the transport properties associated with the layer pseudospin in quantum Hall bilayers.