Published August 10, 2020 | v1
Journal Article Open

Topological flat bands in frustrated kagome lattice CoSn

Abstract

Electronic flat bands in momentum space, arising from strong localization of electrons in real space, are an ideal stage to realize strongly-correlated phenomena. Theoretically, the flat bands can naturally arise in certain geometrically frustrated lattices, often with nontrivial topology if combined with spin-orbit coupling. Here, we report the observation of topological flat bands in frustrated kagome metal CoSn, using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and band structure calculations. Throughout the entire Brillouin zone, the bandwidth of the flat band is suppressed by an order of magnitude compared to the Dirac bands originating from the same orbitals. The frustration-driven nature of the flat band is directly confirmed by the chiral d-orbital texture of the corresponding real-space Wannier functions. Spin-orbit coupling opens a large gap of 80 meV at the quadratic touching point between the Dirac and flat bands, endowing a nonzero Z₂ invariant to the flat band. These findings demonstrate that kagome-derived flat bands are a promising platform for novel emergent phases of matter at the confluence of strong correlation and topology.

Copyright and License

© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Acknowledgement

We thank Paul Neves for insightful discussions and helpful feedbacks. The authors acknowledge Yang Zhang for helping the computation of spin Hall conductivity.

Funding

This work was supported by the STC Center for Integrated Quantum Materials, NSF Grant No. DMR-1231319. R.C. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This research was funded, in part, by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation EPiQS Initiative, Grant No. GBMF3848 to J.G.C. and ARO Grant No. W911NF-16-1-0034. This research used resources of the Advanced Light Source, a US DOE Office of Science User Facility under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231. M.K. acknowledges support from the Samsung Scholarship from the Samsung Foundation of Culture. S.F. is supported by a Rutgers Center for Material Theory Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship. L.Y. acknowledges support from the Tsinghua Education Foundation.

Contributions

M.K., J.D., C.J., A.B., and E.R. performed the ARPES experiment and analyzed the resulting data. S.F. performed the theoretical calculations with help from H.C.P and E.K. L.Y. synthesized and characterized the single crystals. J.G.C. and R.C. supervised the project. M.K., S.F., L.Y., and R.C. wrote the manuscript with input from all coauthors.

Data Availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Article: 41467-020-17465-1.pdf

Supplementary information: 41467_2020_17465_MOESM1_ESM.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
October 24, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023