Thermodynamic evidence of fractional Chern insulator in moiré MoTe2

Nature (2023)Cite this article

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Chern insulators, which are the lattice analogs of the quantum Hall states, can potentially manifest high-temperature topological orders at zero magnetic field to enable next-generation topological quantum devices 1-3. To date, integer Chern insulators have been experimentally demonstrated in several systems at zero magnetic field 3, 4-8, but fractional Chern insulators have been reported only in graphene-based systems under a finite magnetic field 9,10. The emergence of semiconductor moiré materials 11, which support tunable topological flat bands 12,13, opens a new opportunity to realize fractional Chern insulators 13-16. Here, we report thermodynamic evidence of both integer and fractional Chern insulators at zero magnetic field in small-angle twisted bilayer MoTe2 by combining the local electronic compressibility and magneto-optical measurements. At hole filling factor ${\boldsymbol{\nu }}$ = 1 and 2/3, the system is incompressible and spontaneously breaks time reversal symmetry. We show that they are integer and fractional Chern insulators, respectively, from the dispersion of the state in filling factor with applied magnetic field. We further demonstrate electric-field-tuned topological phase transitions involving the Chern insulators. Our findings pave the way for demonstration of quantized fractional Hall conductance and anyonic excitation and braiding 17 in semiconductor moiré materials.

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These authors contributed equally: Yihang Zeng, Zhengchao Xia

Department of Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Yihang Zeng, Kin Fai Mak & Jie Shan

School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Zhengchao Xia, Kaifei Kang, Jiacheng Zhu, Patrick Knüppel, Chirag Vaswani, Kin Fai Mak & Jie Shan

National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan

Kenji Watanabe & Takashi Taniguchi

Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science, Ithaca, NY, USA

Kin Fai Mak & Jie Shan

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Correspondence to Kin Fai Mak or Jie Shan.

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Zeng, Y., Xia, Z., Kang, K. et al. Thermodynamic evidence of fractional Chern insulator in moiré MoTe2. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06452-3

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Received: 01 May 2023

Accepted: 18 July 2023

Published: 26 July 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06452-3

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