Carrier-mediated ferromagnetism in the magnetic topological insulator Cr-doped (Sb,Bi)Te
Ye, M.*; Li, W.*; Zhu, S.-Y.*; Takeda, Yukiharu ; Saito, Yuji ; Wang, J.*; Pan, H.*; Nurmamat, M.*; Sumida, Kazuki*; Ji, F.*; Liu, Z.*; Yang, H.*; Liu, Z.*; Shen, D.*; Kimura, Akio*; Qiao, S.*; Xie, X.*
Magnetically doped topological insulators are predicted to exhibit exotic phenomena including the quantized anomalous Hall effect and a dissipationless transport, which facilitate the development of low-power-consumption devices using electron spins. The realization of the quantized anomalous Hall effect is so far restricted to the Cr-doped (Sb,Bi)Te system at extremely low temperature; however, the microscopic origin of its ferromagnetism is poorly understood. Here we present an element-resolved study for Cr-doped (Sb,Bi)Te using X-ray magnetic circular dichroism to unambiguously show that the long-range magnetic order is mediated by the p-hole carriers of the host lattice, and the interaction between the Sb(Te) p and Cr d states is crucial.