Nanoscale Determination of the Mass Enhancement Factor in the Lightly-Doped Bulk Insulator Lead Selenide

Abstract

Bismuth chalcogenides and lead telluride/selenide alloys exhibit exceptional thermoelectric properties which could be harnessed for power generation and device applications. Since phonons play a significant role in achieving these desired properties, quantifying the interaction between phonons and electrons, which is encoded in the Eliashberg function of a material, is of immense importance. However, its precise extraction has in part been limited due to the lack of local experimental probes. Here we construct a method to directly extract the Eliashberg function using Landau level spectroscopy, and demonstrate its applicability to lightly-doped thermoelectric bulk insulator PbSe. In addition to its high energy resolution only limited by thermal broadening, this novel experimental method could be used to detect variations in mass enhancement factor at the nanoscale. As such, it opens up a new pathway for investigating the effects of chemical defects, surface doping and strain on the mass enhancement factor.

to appear in Nature Communications (2015)

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Origin of the Electron-Phonon Interaction of Topological Semimetal Surfaces Measured with Helium Atom Scattering
• Tuning multiple Landau Quantization in Transition-Metal Dichalcogenide with Strain
• Revealing Pronounced Electron-Hole Fermi Pockets in the Charge Density Wave Semimetal LaTe3
• Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy of Subsurface Ag and Ge Impurities in Copper
• Observation of near EF Fermi-arc van Hove singularity with prominent coupling to phonon in a van der Waals coupled Weyl semimetal