Abstract
Soon after the article ‘Experimental Observation of the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect (QAHE) in a Magnetic Topological Insulator’ was published online in Science, Qikun Xue, the team leader of this fabulous work from Tsinghua University, was flooded with requests for interviews. This is not so surprising. Physicists have been waiting for the observation of the QAHE for over 20 years, and, until 2013, there had been few groundbreaking experimental results. ‘The honor absolutely belongs to the entire group, especially our budding scientists’, Xue declared, Xucun Ma and Ke He, two scientists of Institute of Physics, CAS, are certainly among them. In 2009, Ma and He commenced their journey to find a unique material that could demonstrate the QAHE under the leadership of Xue.