Competing magnetic interactions in the antiferromagnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4
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Ames National Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), operated by and located on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.
For more than 70 years, the Ames National Laboratory has successfully partnered with Iowa State University, and is unique among the 17 DOE laboratories in that it is physically located on the campus of a major research university. Many of the scientists and administrators at the Laboratory also hold faculty positions at the University and the Laboratory has access to both undergraduate and graduate student talent.
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Abstract
The antiferromagnetic (AFM) compound MnBi2Te4 is suggested to be the first realization of an AFM topological insulator. We report on inelastic neutron scattering studies of the magnetic interactions in MnBi2Te4 that possess ferromagnetic triangular layers with AFM interlayer coupling. The spin waves display a large spin gap and pairwise exchange interactions within the triangular layer are long ranged and frustrated by large next-nearest neighbor AFM exchange. The degree of frustration suggests proximity to a variety of magnetic phases, potentially including skyrmion phases, which could be accessed in chemically tuned compounds or upon the application of symmetry-breaking fields.
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This article is published as Li, Bing, J-Q. Yan, D. M. Pajerowski, Elijah Gordon, A-M. Nedić, Y. Sizyuk, Liqin Ke, P. P. Orth, D. Vaknin, and R. J. McQueeney. "Competing Magnetic Interactions in the Antiferromagnetic Topological Insulator MnBi 2 Te 4." Physical Review Letters 124, no. 16 (2020): 167204. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.167204. Posted with permission.