A magnetic Weyl semimetallic phase in thin films of Eu${}_2$Ir${}_2$O${}_7$

Abstract

The interplay between electronic interactions and strong spin-orbit coupling is expected to create a plethora of fascinating correlated topological states of quantum matter. Of particular interest are magnetic Weyl semimetals originally proposed in the pyrochlore iridates, which are only expected to reveal their topological nature in thin film form. To date, however, direct experimental demonstrations of these exotic phases remain elusive, due to the lack of usable single crystals and the insufficient quality of available films. Here, we report on the discovery of the long-sought magnetic Weyl semi-metallic phase in (111)-oriented Eu${}_2$Ir${}_2$O${}_7$ high-quality epitaxial thin films. The topological magnetic state shows an intrinsic anomalous Hall effect with colossal coercivity but vanishing net magnetization, which emerges below the onset of a peculiar magnetic phase with all-in-all-out antiferromagnetic ordering. The observed anomalous Hall conductivity arises from the non-zero Berry curvature emanated by Weyl node pairs near the Fermi level that act as sources and sinks of Berry flux, activated by broken cubic crystal symmetry at the top and bottom terminations of the thin film.

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Advances in Complex Oxide Quantum Materials Through New Approaches to Molecular Beam Epitaxy
• The interplay between structural, magnetic and electronic states in the pyrochlore iridate Eu2Ir2O7
• Synthesis of epitaxial magnetic pyrochlore heterojunctions
• Weak antilocalization and localization in Eu${}_2$Ir${}_2$O${}_7$ (111) thin films by reactive solid phase epitaxy
• Soft-Chemical Synthesis, Structure Evolution, and Insulator-to-Metal Transition in a Prototypical Metal Oxide, λ-RhO${}_2$
• Renormalized density matrix downfolding: A rigorous framework in learning emergent models from ab initio many-body calculations
• Double rotatory power reversal, continuous Kerr angle, and enhanced reflectance in bi-isotropic media with anomalous Hall current
• Emergent Weyl Fermions in an Orbital Multipolar Ordering Phase
• Connecting the avoided quantum critical point to the magic-angle transition in three-dimensional Weyl semimetals
• Magnon bands in pyrochlore slabs with Heisenberg exchange and anisotropies
• Localized degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac and Weyl equations
• Hearing the light: stray-field noise from the emergent photon in quantum spin ice