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Magnetic topological insulators are narrow-gap semiconductor materials that combine non-trivial band topology and magnetic order. Unlike their nonmagnetic counterparts, magnetic topological insulators may have some of the surfaces gapped, which enables a number of exotic phenomena that have potential applications in spintronics, such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect and chiral Majorana fermions. So far, magnetic topological insulators have only been created by means of doping nonmagnetic topological insulators with 3d transition-metal elements; however, such an approach leads to strongly inhomogeneous magnetic and electronic properties of these materials, restricting the observation of important effects to very low temperatures. An intrinsic magnetic topological insulator—a stoichiometric well ordered magnetic compound—could be an ideal solution to these problems, but no such material has been observed so far. Here we predict by ab initio calculations and further confirm using various experimental techniques the realization of an antiferromagnetic topological insulator in the layered van der Waals compound MnBiTe. The antiferromagnetic ordering that MnBiTe shows makes it invariant with respect to the combination of the time-reversal and primitive-lattice translation symmetries, giving rise to a ℤ topological classification; ℤ = 1 for MnBiTe, confirming its topologically nontrivial nature. Our experiments indicate that the symmetry-breaking (0001) surface of MnBiTe exhibits a large bandgap in the topological surface state. We expect this property to eventually enable the observation of a number of fundamental phenomena, among them quantized magnetoelectric coupling and axion electrodynamics. Other exotic phenomena could become accessible at much higher temperatures than those reached so far, such as the quantum anomalous Hall effect and chiral Majorana fermions.

Semiconductors with strong spin–orbit interaction as the underlying mechanism for the generation of spin-polarized electrons are showing potential for applications in spintronic devices. Unveiling the full spin texture in momentum space for such materials and its relation to the microscopic structure of the electronic wave functions is experimentally challenging and yet essential for exploiting spin–orbit effects for spin manipulation. Here we employ a state-of-the-art photoelectron momentum microscope with a multichannel spin filter to directly image the spin texture of the layered polar semiconductor BiTeI within the full two-dimensional momentum plane. Our experimental results, supported by relativistic ab initio calculations, demonstrate that the valence and conduction band electrons in BiTeI have spin textures of opposite chirality and of pronounced orbital dependence beyond the standard Rashba model, the latter giving rise to strong optical selection-rule effects on the photoelectron spin polarization. These observations open avenues for spin-texture manipulation by atomic-layer and charge carrier control in polar semiconductors.