Spin-orbit quantum impurity in a topological magnet

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Documents

  • Jia-Xin Yin
  • Nana Shumiya
  • Yuxiao Jiang
  • Huibin Zhou
  • Gennevieve Macam
  • Hano Omar Mohammad Sura
  • Songtian S. Zhang
  • Zi-Jia Cheng
  • Zurab Guguchia
  • Yangmu Li
  • Qi Wang
  • Maksim Litskevich
  • Ilya Belopolski
  • Xian P. Yang
  • Tyler A. Cochran
  • Guoqing Chang
  • Qi Zhang
  • Zhi-Quan Huang
  • Feng-Chuan Chuang
  • Hsin Lin
  • Hechang Lei
  • Ziqiang Wang
  • Shuang Jia
  • M. Zahid Hasan

Quantum states induced by single-atomic impurities are at the frontier of physics and material science. While such states have been reported in high-temperature superconductors and dilute magnetic semiconductors, they are unexplored in topological magnets which can feature spin-orbit tunability. Here we use spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/S) to study the engineered quantum impurity in a topological magnet Co3Sn2S2. We find that each substituted In impurity introduces a striking localized bound state. Our systematic magnetization-polarized probe reveals that this bound state is spin-down polarized, in lock with a negative orbital magnetization. Moreover, the magnetic bound states of neighboring impurities interact to form quantized orbitals, exhibiting an intriguing spin-orbit splitting, analogous to the splitting of the topological fermion line. Our work collectively demonstrates the strong spin-orbit effect of the single-atomic impurity at the quantum level, suggesting that a nonmagnetic impurity can introduce spin-orbit coupled magnetic resonance in topological magnets. Single-atomic impurities may induce novel quantum state, but they are unexplored in topological magnets. Here, the authors report spin-down polarized bound states which further interact with neighboring states to form spin-orbit split quantized orbitals in a topological magnet Co3Sn2S2.

Original languageEnglish
Article number4415
JournalNature Communications
Volume11
Issue number1
Number of pages6
ISSN2041-1723
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4 Sep 2020

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