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Emergence of a Symmetry-Broken Chern Insulator near a Moiré Kondo Breakdown

Wanghao Tian1,*, Bowen Shen2,3,*, Lizhong Li2,3, Mingjie Zhang4, Feng Liu1, Chushan Li1,5, Yaotian Liu4, Fan Xu1,5, Kenji Watanabe6 et al.

Takashi Taniguchi7, Peiling Li4, Li Lu4,8, Yang Xu4, Shengwei Jiang1,5,†, Tingxin Li1,5,8,‡, Jie Shan2,3,9,§, and Kin Fai Mak2,3,9,∥

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: swjiang@sjtu.edu.cn
  • ‡Contact author: txli89@sjtu.edu.cn
  • §Contact author: jie.shan@mpsd.mpg.de
  • ∥Contact author: kin-fai.mak@mpsd.mpg.de
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 206602 – Published 13 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/szcj-44xj

Abstract

Moiré semiconductors built on angle-aligned transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) heterobilayers provide a physical realization of the Kondo lattice model, in which one TMD layer is prepared in a Mott insulating state supporting a lattice of local magnetic moments and the other layer in a metallic state supporting itinerant carriers. The artificial Kondo lattice enables the exploration of exotic states of matter near a continuously tunable Kondo breakdown. Here we report the emergence of a symmetry-broken Chern insulator at a moiré hole filling factor 4/3 in angle-aligned MoTe2/WSe2 moiré bilayers, which realize a chiral Kondo lattice. The symmetry-broken Chern insulator, which exhibits integer quantized Hall conductance at a fractional moiré filling, breaks the translational symmetry of the lattice spontaneously; it also appears only near a magnetic-field-induced Kondo breakdown in the mixed-valence regime of the material. We further demonstrate that the magnetic field required to induce the Kondo breakdown and to stabilize the symmetry-broken Chern insulator is twist angle dependent. The results present new opportunities for exploring the subtle interplay between topology and Kondo interactions in moiré semiconductors.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 206602– Published 13 November, 2026
  • Received 18 February 2026
  • Revised 7 August 2026
  • Accepted 13 October 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.

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