Emergent giant topological Hall effect in twisted Fe3GeTe2 metallic system
The topological Hall effect, driven by the exchange interaction between conduction electrons and topological magnetic textures such as skyrmions, is a powerful probe for investigating the topological properties of magnetic materials. Typically, this phenomenon arises in systems with broken global inversion symmetry, where Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions stabilize such textures. Here, we report the discovery of an emergent giant topological Hall effect in the twisted Fe<sub>3</sub>GeTe<sub>2</sub> metallic system, which notably preserves the general global inversion symmetry. This effect manifests exclusively within a narrow window of "magic" twist angles ranging from 0.45° to 0.75°, while it is absent outside of that range, highlighting its unique and emergent nature. Micromagnetic simulations reveal that this topological Hall effect originates from a skyrmion lattice induced by alternating in-plane and layer-contrasting Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions that result from local inversion symmetry breaking. Our findings underscore twisted Fe<sub>3</sub>GeTe<sub>2</sub> as a versatile platform for engineering and controlling topological magnetic textures in metallic twisted van der Waals magnets, thereby opening up new avenues for next-generation spintronic devices.
Authors
- Ran Cheng (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0166-2172)
- Giung Park (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2603-2548)
- Yu-Hang Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6336-5088)
- Je-Geun Park
- Hyuncheol Kim
- Kai-Xuan Zhang
Institutions
- University of California, Riverside (US)
- Seoul National University (KR)
- Washington University in St. Louis (US)
- Nankai University (CN)
- National University College (PR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2026-02-19
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69454-5
- Primary Topic
- Topological Materials and Phenomena
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Indian Institute of Science
- National Research Foundation
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- National Research Foundation of Korea
- Infosys Foundation
- Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin City
- Samsung
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
- Division of Materials Research