Nanoscale decoupling of electronic nematicity and structural anisotropy in FeSe thin films

Abstract

In a material prone to a nematic instability, anisotropic strain in principle provides a preferred symmetry-breaking direction for the electronic nematic state to follow. This is consistent with experimental observations, where electronic nematicity and structural anisotropy typically appear hand-in-hand. In this work, we discover that electronic nematicity can be locally decoupled from the underlying structural anisotropy in strain-engineered iron-selenide (FeSe) thin films. We use heteroepitaxial molecular beam epitaxy to grow FeSe with a nanoscale network of modulations that give rise to spatially varying strain. We map local anisotropic strain by analyzing scanning tunneling microscopy topographs, and visualize electronic nematic domains from concomitant spectroscopic maps. While the domains form so that the energy of nemato-elastic coupling is minimized, we observe distinct regions where electronic nematic ordering fails to flip direction, even though the underlying structural anisotropy is locally reversed. The findings point towards a nanometer-scale stiffness of the nematic order parameter.

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• Charge order landscape and competition with superconductivity in kagome metals
• Discovery of a pair density wave state in a monolayer high-Tc iron-based superconductor
• Incommensurate smectic phase in close proximity to the high-Tc superconductor FeSe/SrTiO3
• Atomically-precise engineering of spin-orbit polarons in a kagome magnetic Weyl semimetal
• Tomonaga Luttinger liquid in the topological edge channel of multilayer FeSe
• Checkerboard order state in superconducting FeSe/SrTiO3(001) monolayer
• Nanoscale visualization of the thermally-driven evolution of antiferromagnetic domains in FeTe thin films
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• Suppression and revival of superconducting phase coherence in monolayer FeSe/SrTiO${}_3$
• Compatible Instability: Gauge Constraints of Elasticity Inherited by Electronic Nematic Criticality