Dirac fermion approach and its application to design high Chern numbers in magnetic topological insulator multilayers

Abstract

Quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) insulators host topologically protected dissipationless chiral edge states, the number of which is determined by the Chern number. Up to now, the QAH state has been realized in a few magnetic topological insulators, but usually with a low Chern number. Here, we develop a Dirac-fermion approach which is valuable to understand and design high Chern numbers in various multilayers of layered magnetic topological insulators. Based on the Dirac-fermion approach, we demonstrate how to understand and tune high Chern numbers in ferromagentic ${\mathrm{MnBi}}_{2}{\mathrm{Te}}_{4}$ films through the van der Waals (vdW) gap modulation. Further, we also employ the Dirac-fermion approach to understand the experimentally observed high Chern numbers and topological phase transition from the Chern number $C=2$ to $C=1$ in the $[\mathrm{3QL}\text{\ensuremath{-}}(\mathrm{Bi}\text{,}{\mathrm{Sb})}_{1.76}{\mathrm{Cr}}_{0.24}{\mathrm{Te}}_{3}]$/$[\mathrm{4QL}\text{\ensuremath{-}}(\mathrm{Bi}\text{,}{\mathrm{Sb})}_{2}{\mathrm{Te}}_{3}]$ multilayers. Our work provides a powerful tool to design the QAH states with a high Chern number in layered magnetic topological insulator multilayers.