Paper detail

Antiferromagnetic quantum spin Hall states in iron halogenide

It is widely known that quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulator can be viewed as two copies of quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) insulator with opposite local magnetic moments. However, nearly every QSH insulator discovered so far is a nonmagnetic semiconductor. Due to the vanishing local magnetic moment of each copy, the QAH states only conceptually exist in these QSH insulators. In this work, we show a realistic construction of QSH states with finite local magnetic moment by staking bilayer QAH insulators. Our explicit construction benefits from an effective QAH model with a large topological gap and is further supported by a class of two-dimensional ferromagnetic materials. Our work not only validates the conceptual relationship of QSH and QAH but also provides an ideal material platform for realizing antiferromagnetic QSH state which is highly tunable between QAH and QSH states as a function of the number of layers.