Magnetic van der Waals (vdW) materials have been heavily pursued for fundamental physics as well as for device design. Despite the rapid advances, so far magnetic vdW materials are mainly insulating or semiconducting, and none of them possesses a high electronic mobilitya property that is rare in layered vdW materials in general. The realization of a magnetic high-mobility vdW material would open the possibility for novel magnetic twistronic or spintronic devices.Here we report very high carrier mobility in the layered vdW antiferromagnet GdTe 3. The electron mobility is beyond 60,000 cm 2 V -1 s -1 , which is the highest among all known layered magnetic materials, to the best of our knowledge. Among all known vdW materials, the mobility of bulk GdTe 3 is comparable to that of black phosphorus, and is only surpassed by graphite. By mechanical exfoliation, we further demonstrate that GdTe 3 can be exfoliated to ultrathin flakes of three monolayers, and that the magnetic order and relatively high mobility is retained in ~20-nm-thin flakes.VdW materials are the parent compounds of two-dimensional (2D) materials, which are currently actively studied for new device fabrications (1) involving the creation of heterostructure stacks (2) or twisted bilayers (3) of 2D building blocks. Magnetic vdW materials have recently led to the observation of intrinsic magnetic order in atomically thin layers (4-12), which was followed by exciting discoveries of giant tunneling magnetoresistance (13-16) and tunable magnetism (17)(18)(19) in such materials.So far, the known magnetic vdW materials (ferro-or antiferromagnetic) that can be exfoliated are limited to a few examples, such as: CrI3 (4), Cr2Ge2Te6 (5), FePS3 (6,7), CrBr3 (8, 9), CrCl3 (10-12), Fe3GeTe2 (17,20), and RuCl3 (21-23). Out of these, only Fe3GeTe2 is a metallic ferromagnet and there is no known vdW-based 2D antiferromagnetic metal. Moreover, no evidence of high carrier mobilities has been reported in any of these exfoliated thin materials or even in their bulk vdW crystals. In general, high mobility is limited to very few vdW materials, such as graphite (24) and black phosphorus (25). A material with high electronic mobility and a corresponding high mean-free-path (MFP), might be critical for potential magnetic "twistronic" devices (3) where a large MFP could enable interesting phenomena in a Moiré-supercell induced flat band. In addition, conducting antiferromagnetic materials are the prime candidates for high-speed antiferromagnetic spintronic devices (26). Here we report the realization of a very high electronic mobility in a vdW layered antiferromagnet, GdTe3, both in bulk and exfoliated thin flakes.We chose to study GdTe3, since rare-earth tritellurides (RTe3, R = La-Nd, Sm, and Gd-Tm) are structurally related to topological semimetal ZrSiS (27,28), while being known to exhibit an incommensurate charge density wave (CDW) (29-31), rich magnetic properties (32), and becoming superconducting under high-pressure (R = Gd, Tb and Dy) (33). Combined, these properties ...

The interplay between topology and correlations can generate a variety of unusual quantum phases, many of which remain to be explored. Recent advances have identified monolayer WTe2 as a promising material for exploring such interplay in a highly tunable fashion. The ground state of this two-dimensional (2D) crystal can be electrostatically tuned from a quantum spin Hall insulator (QSHI) to a superconductor. However, much remains unknown about the nature of these ground states, including the gap-opening mechanism of the insulating state. Here we report systematic studies of the insulating phase in WTe2 monolayer and uncover evidence supporting that the QSHI is also an excitonic insulator (EI). An EI, arising from the spontaneous formation of electron-hole bound states (excitons), is a largely unexplored quantum phase to date, especially when it is topological. Our experiments on high-quality transport devices reveal the presence of an intrinsic insulating state at the charge neutrality point (CNP) in clean samples. The state exhibits both a strong sensitivity to the electric displacement field and a Hall anomaly that are consistent with the excitonic pairing. We further confirm the correlated nature of this charge-neutral insulator by tunneling spectroscopy. Our results support the existence of an EI phase in the clean limit and rule out alternative scenarios of a band insulator or a localized insulator. These observations lay the foundation for understanding a new class of correlated insulators with nontrivial topology and identify monolayer WTe2 as a promising candidate for exploring quantum phases of ground-state excitons.

In strongly correlated materials, quasiparticle excitations can carry fractional quantum numbers. An intriguing possibility is the formation of fractionalized, chargeneutral fermions, e.g., spinons 1 and fermionic excitons 2,3 , that result in neutral Fermi surfaces and Landau quantization 4,5 in an insulator. While previous experiments in quantum spin liquids 1 , topological Kondo insulators [6][7][8] , and quantum Hall systems 3,9 have hinted at charge-neutral Fermi surfaces, evidence for their existence remains far from conclusive. Here we report experimental observation of Landau quantization in a two dimensional (2D) insulator, i.e., monolayer tungsten ditelluride (WTe2), a large gap topological insulator [10][11][12][13] . Using a detection scheme that avoids edge contributions, we uncover strikingly large quantum oscillations in the monolayer insulator's magnetoresistance, with an onset field as small as ~ 0.5 tesla. Despite the huge resistance, the oscillation profile, which exhibits many periods, mimics the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in metals. Remarkably, at ultralow temperatures the observed oscillations evolve into discrete peaks near 1.6 tesla, above which the Landau quantized regime is fully developed. Such a low onset field of quantization is comparable to high-mobility conventional two-dimensional electron gases. Our experiments call for further investigation of the highly unusual ground state of the WTe2 monolayer. This includes the influence of device components and the possible existence of mobile fermions and charge-neutral Fermi surfaces inside its insulating gap. MainBulk tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) is a compensated semimetal in which an equal number of electrons and holes co-exist 14 . The semimetallic behavior remains when the material is thinned down to the trilayers 11,15 . In bilayers and monolayers, nevertheless, an insulating gap is observed 11 , giving rise to the high-temperature quantum spin Hall effect in monolayers [10][11][12][13] . However, the mechanism for the gap opening remains mysterious 10,11,16,17 . The observation of superconductivity when the monolayer is doped with a low electron density 18,19 highlights the unusual nature of the insulating state.

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Bulk Td-WTe 2 is a semimetal, while its monolayer counterpart is a two-dimensional (2D) topological insulator. Recently, electronic transport resembling a Luttinger liquid state was found in twisted-bilayer WTe 2 (tWTe 2 ) with a twist angle of ∼5°. Despite the strong interest in 2D WTe 2 systems, little experimental information is available about their intrinsic microstructure, leaving obstacles in modeling their physical properties. The monolayer, and consequently tWTe 2 , are highly air-sensitive, and therefore, probing their atomic structures is difficult. In this study, we develop a robust method for atomic-resolution visualization of monolayers and tWTe 2 obtained through mechanical exfoliation and fabrication. We confirm the high crystalline quality of mechanically exfoliated WTe 2 samples and observe that tWTe 2 with twist angles of ∼5 and ∼2°retains its pristine moiréstructure without substantial deformations or reconstructions. The results provide a structural foundation for future electronic modeling of monolayer and tWTe 2 moirélattices.