Emergent Heavy-Fermion Physics in a Family of Topological Insulators RAsS (R = Y, La, and Sm)
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Realizing topological phases in strongly correlated materials has become a major impetus in condensed matter physics. Although many compounds are now classified as topological insulators, f-electron systems provide an especially fertile platform for emergent heavy-fermion phenomena driven by the interplay of topology and many-body effects. In this study, we examine the crystalline topology of a new RAsS series (R = Y, La, Sm), revealing a structural variant from previous reports. We demonstrate that YAsS and SmAsS host hourglass fermions protected by glide symmetry. SmAsS notably exhibits a strong effective-mass enhancement, placing it alongside SmB6 and YbB12 as a material that exemplifies how the Kondo effects pin the correlated f-electron states near the Fermi energy and, consequently, renormalize the energy and mass scales of topological surface states without destroying their crystalline protection. This tunability establishes SmAsS as a bridge between weakly correlated topological materials and Kondo insulators. To capture these features, we construct a minimal model incorporating f-electron degrees of freedom, which reproduces the observed topological properties and predicts that the surface states survive in the correlated regime, albeit shifted in energy. Our work thus introduces a new family of correlated topological materials and forecasts the robustness of their surface states under Kondo correlations.
Details
| Original language | English |
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| Pages (from-to) | 12979-12989 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Journal of the American Chemical Society |
| Volume | 148 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2026 |
| Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
| PubMed | 41805358 |
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| ORCID | /0000-0001-7523-9313/work/223382140 |