Dirac Surface States in Intrinsic Magnetic Topological Insulators EuSn2As2 and MnBi2nTe3n+1

Abstract

In magnetic topological insulators (TIs), the interplay between magnetic order and nontrivial topology can induce fascinating topological quantum phenomena, such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect, chiral Majorana fermions, and axion electrodynamics.Recently, a great deal of attention has been focused on the intrinsic magnetic TIs, where disorder effects can be eliminated to a large extent, which is expected to facilitate the emergence of topological quantum phenomena.Despite intensive efforts, experimental evidence of the topological surface states (SSs) remains elusive.Here, by combining first-principles calculations and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiments, we reveal that EuSn 2 As 2 is an antiferromagnetic TI with the observation of Dirac SSs consistent with our prediction.We also observe nearly gapless Dirac SSs in antiferromagnetic TIs MnBi 2n Te 3nþ1 (n ¼ 1 and 2), which are absent in previous ARPES results.These results provide clear evidence for nontrivial topology of these intrinsic magnetic TIs.Furthermore, we find that the topological SSs show no observable changes across the magnetic transition within the experimental resolution, indicating that the magnetic order has a quite small effect on the topological SSs, which can be attributed to weak hybridization between the localized