Candidate for a Fractional Topological Insulator in Twisted MoTe2

[2601.18508] Candidate for a Fractional Topological Insulator in Twisted MoTe2 Skip to main content Search Submit Donate Log in Condensed Matter > Strongly Correlated Electrons arXiv:2601.18508 (cond-mat) [Submitted on 26 Jan 2026 ( v1 ), last revised 27 Aug 2026 (this version, v4)] Title: Candidate for a Fractional Topological Insulator in Twisted MoTe2 Authors: Yiping Wang , Gillian E. Minarik , Weijie Li , Yves Kwan , Shuai Yuan , Eric Anderson , Chaowei Hu , Julian Ingham , Jeongheon Choe , Takashi Taniguchi , Kenji Watanabe , Xavier Roy , Jiun-Haw Chu , Raquel Queiroz , James C. Hone , N. Regnault , Xiaodong Xu , Xiaoyang Zhu View PDF Abstract: The interplay among electronic correlation, topology, and time-reversal-symmetry (TRS) often leads to exotic quantum states of matter, as highlighted by the discoveries of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) in twisted bilayer MoTe2 (tMoTe2). Among the FCIs in tMoTe2, the most robust is at a hole filling factor of v=-2/3 per moiré unit cell. Here, employing pump-probe circular dichroism (CD) measurement on tMoTe2 at twist angles (3.9 and 3.7 degrees), we show that a correlated state at v =-4/3 exhibits an unusual Ising antiferromagnet behavior. The v =-4/3 state with no net magnetization undergoes first order phase transitions at extremely low magnetic fields of ~ 2-6 mT to partially valley polarized (PVP) states. This behavior is notably absent for all other correlated states in tMoTe2 and also disappears for v =-4/3 at higher or lower twist angles (4.0 or 3.3 degree). The observed magnetic signature is consistent with a theoretically proposed fractional topological insulator (FTI), consisting of two copies of v =-2/3 FCIs with opposite chirality in the two K valleys. The experimental results are supported by interacting continuum model calculations that reveal the extreme closeness in energy ( < 1 meV) between the putative FTI and PVP states. Our findings present a candidate FTI with TRS and call for advanced transport and imaging measurements to establish the quantized helical edge modes. Comments: 46 pages, 4 figures, and 14 SI figures Subjects: Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) Cite as: arXiv:2601.18508 [cond-mat.str-el] (or arXiv:2601.18508v4 [cond-mat.str-el] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.18508 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Journal reference: Y. Wang et al. Physical Review X 16 (2026) 031009 Related DOI : https://doi.org/10.1103/bvrb-z4hj Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources Submission history From: Xiaoyang Zhu [ view email ] [v1] Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:13:17 UTC (11,542 KB) [v2] Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:31:54 UTC (10,737 KB) [v3] Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:38:54 UTC (11,409 KB) [v4] Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:37:47 UTC (9,116 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View PDF view license Current browse context: cond-mat.str-el < prev | next > new | recent | 2026-01 Change to browse by: cond-mat References & Citations SciX Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer ( What is the Explorer? ) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers ( What is Connected Papers? ) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps ( What is Litmaps? ) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations ( What are Smart Citations? ) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv ( What is alphaXiv? ) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers ( What is CatalyzeX? ) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub ( What is DagsHub? ) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub ( What is GotitPub? ) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face ( What is Huggingface? ) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast ( What is ScienceCast? ) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate ( What is Replicate? ) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces ( What is Spaces? ) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI ( What is TXYZ.AI? ) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower ( What are Influence Flowers? ) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender ( What is CORE? ) IArxiv recommender toggle IArxiv Recommender ( What is IArxiv? ) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. 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