Heavy d-electron quasiparticle interference and real-space electronic structure of Sr₃Ru₂O₇
As well as providing subatomic-scale real-space images of metals, the scanning tunnelling microscope also reveals momentum–space information. Now it is possible to use this technique to image a heavy-electron liquid and obtain information on orbital structures. The intriguing idea that strongly inte...
Guardado en:
| Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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| Formato: | Articulo |
| Lenguaje: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
2009
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | http://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/handle/10915/123869 |
| Aporte de: |
| Sumario: | As well as providing subatomic-scale real-space images of metals, the scanning tunnelling microscope also reveals momentum–space information. Now it is possible to use this technique to image a heavy-electron liquid and obtain information on orbital structures. The intriguing idea that strongly interacting electrons can generate spatially inhomogeneous electronic liquid-crystalline phases is over a decade old, but these systems still represent an unexplored frontier of condensed-matter physics. One reason is that visualization of the many-body quantum states generated by the strong interactions, and of the resulting electronic phases, has not been achieved. Soft condensed-matter physics was transformed by microscopies that enabled imaging of real-space structures and patterns. A candidate technique for obtaining equivalent data in the purely electronic systems is spectroscopic imaging scanning tunnelling microscopy (SI-STM). The core challenge is to detect the tenuous but ‘heavy’ momentum (k)-space components of the many-body electronic state simultaneously with its real-space constituents. Sr₃Ru₂O₇ provides a particularly exciting opportunity to address these issues. It possesses a very strongly renormalized ‘heavy’ d-electron Fermi liquid and exhibits a field-induced transition to an electronic liquid-crystalline phase. Finally, as a layered compound, it can be cleaved to present an excellent surface for SI-STM. |
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