Realization of a hole-doped Mott insulator on a triangular silicon lattice

Abstract

The physics of doped Mott insulators is at the heart of some of the most exotic physical phenomena in materials research including insulator-metal transitions, colossal magneto-resistance, and high-temperature superconductivity in layered perovskite compounds. Advances in this field would greatly benefit from the availability of new material systems with similar richness of physical phenomena, but with fewer chemical and structural complications in comparison to oxides. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy, we show that such a system can be realized on a silicon platform. Adsorption of one-third monolayer of Sn atoms on a Si(111) surface produces a triangular surface lattice with half-filled dangling bond orbitals. Modulation hole-doping of these dangling bonds unveils clear hallmarks of Mott physics, such as spectral weight transfer and the formation of quasi-particle states at the Fermi level, well-defined Fermi contour segments, and a sharp singularity in the density of states. These observations are remarkably similar to those made in complex oxide materials, including high-temperature superconductors, but highly extraordinary within the realm of conventional sp-bonded semiconductor materials. It suggests that exotic quantum matter phases can be realized and engineered on silicon-based materials platforms.

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• First direct observation of the Van Hove singularity in the tunneling spectra of cuprates
• Time-Resolved Imaging of Negative Differential Resistance on the Atomic Scale
• Realistic modeling of the electronic structure and the effect of correlations for Sn/Si(111) and Sn/Ge(111) surfaces
• Quantifying many-body effects by high-resolution Fourier transform scanning tunneling spectroscopy

Cited by in corpus (28)

• Evidence for chiral superconductivity on a silicon surface
• Superconductivity in a hole-doped Mott-insulating triangular adatom layer on a silicon surface
• Triplet Superconductivity from Nonlocal Coulomb Repulsion in an Atomic Sn Layer Deposited onto a Si(111) Substrate
• Unconventional superconductivity in the extended Hubbard model: Weak-coupling renormalization group
• Mott phase in a van der Waals transition-metal halide at single layer limit
• Chiral spin texture in the charge-density-wave phase of the correlated metallic Pb/Si(111) monolayer
• Mott transition, Widom line and pseudogap in the half-filled triangular lattice Hubbard model
• Low-Temperature Insulating Phase of the Si(111)--7$\times$7 Surface
• Doping-dependent charge- and spin-density wave orderings in a monolayer of Pb adatoms on Si(111)
• Zero-bias anomaly in nano-scale hole-doped Mott insulators on a triangular silicon surface
• Magnetic Fluctuations and the Spin-Orbit Interaction in Mott Insulating CoO
• Extremely correlated fermi liquid of $t$-$J$ model in two dimensions
• Charge ordered phases in the hole-doped triangular Mott insulator 4Hb-TaS2
• Coupled Sublattice Melting and Charge-Order Transition in Two Dimensions
• Atomic and electronic structure of doped Si(111)(2root3x2root3)R30(degrees)-Sn interfaces
• Charge density wave in single-layer Pb/Ge(111) driven by Pb-substrate exchange interaction
• Doping the Mott insulating state of the triangular-lattice Hubbard model reveals the Sordi transition
• Experimental observation of pseudogap in a modulation-doped Mott insulator: Sn/Si(111)-($\sqrt{3}\times \sqrt{3}$)-R30${}^{\text{o}}$
• Non-charge-transfer origin of Tc Enhancement in a Surface Superconductor Si(111)-(root7xroot3)-In with Adsorbed Organic Molecules
• Magnetism and superconductivity in doped triangular-lattice Mott insulators
• Two $T$-linear scattering rate regimes in the triangular lattice Hubbard model
• Chern number landscape of spin-orbit coupled chiral superconductors
• Electronic structure, spin-orbit interaction and electron-phonon coupling of triangular adatom lattices on semiconductor substrates
• Atomic-scale analysis of disorder by similarity learning from tunneling spectroscopy
• Angular momentum of vortex-core Majorana zero modes
• The electronic structure of a doped Mott-Hubbard surface
• Signatures of the order parameter of a superconducting adatom layer in magnetic field dependent quasiparticle interference
• Theory of anisotropic elastoresistivity of two-dimensional extremely strongly correlated metals