Quantum billiards with correlated electrons confined in triangular transition metal dichalcogenide monolayer nanostructures created by laser quench

Abstract

Forcing systems though fast non-equilibrium phase transitions offers the opportunity to study new states of quantum matter that self-assemble in their wake. Here we study the quantum interference effects of correlated electrons confined in monolayer quantum nanostructures, created by femtosecond laser-induced quench through a first-order polytype structural transition in a layered transition-metal dichalcogenide material. Scanning tunnelling microscopy of the electrons confined within equilateral triangles, whose dimensions are a few crystal unit cells on the side, reveals that the trajectories are strongly modified from free-electron states both by electronic correlations and confinement. Comparison of experiments with theoretical predictions of strongly correlated electron behaviour reveals that the confining geometry destabilizes the Wigner/Mott crystal ground state, resulting in mixed itinerant and correlation-localized states intertwined on a length scale of 1 nm. Occasionally, itinerant-electron states appear to follow quantum interferences which are suggestive of classical trajectories (quantum scars). The work opens the path toward understanding the quantum transport of electrons confined in atomic-scale monolayer structures based on correlated-electron-materials.

References in corpus (5)

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• Chaotic Dirac billiard in graphene quantum dots
• Correlated electronic states at domain walls of a Mott-charge-density-wave insulator 1T-TaS2
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Tight-binding billiards
• A high-efficiency programmable modulator for extreme ultraviolet light with nm feature size based on an electronic phase transition
• Topical review: the nature of the ground state and possibility of a quantum spin liquid in 1T metal dichalcogenides
• Scanning tunneling microscopy study of hidden phases in atomically thin 1T-TaS${}_2$