Chern Insulator Phase in a Lattice of an Organic Dirac Semimetal with Intracellular Potential and Magnetic Modulations

Abstract

We demonstrate that a Chern insulator could be realized on a real two-dimensional lattice of an organic Dirac semimetal {\alpha}-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 by introducing potential and magnetic modulations in a unit cell. It is a topologically-nontrivial insulator which shows the quantum Hall effect even at zero magnetic field. We assumed a pattern of site potential and staggered plaquette magnetic flux on the lattice so as to imitate the observed stripe charge ordering pattern. When the magnetic modulation is sufficiently large, the system becomes a Chern insulator, where Berry curvatures around two gapped Dirac cones have the same sign on each band, and one chiral edge state connects the conduction and valence bands at each crystal edge. The present model is an organic version of Haldane's model, which discussed the Chern insulator on the honeycomb lattice with second nearest neighbor couplings.