RESUMEN
Sr2IrO4 has attracted considerable attention due to its structural and electronic similarities to La2CuO4, the parent compound of high-Tc superconducting cuprates. It was proposed as a strong spin-orbit-coupled Jeff = 1/2 Mott insulator, but the Mott nature of its insulating ground state has not been conclusively established. Here, we use ultrafast laser pulses to realize an insulator-metal transition in Sr2IrO4 and probe the resulting dynamics using time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. We observe a gap closure and the formation of weakly renormalized electronic bands in the gap region. Comparing these observations to the expected temperature and doping evolution of Mott gaps and Hubbard bands provides clear evidence that the insulating state does not originate from Mott correlations. We instead propose a correlated band insulator picture, where antiferromagnetic correlations play a key role in the gap opening. More broadly, our results demonstrate that energy-momentum-resolved nonequilibrium dynamics can be used to clarify the nature of equilibrium states in correlated materials.
RESUMEN
The excitonic insulator is an electronically driven phase of matter that emerges upon the spontaneous formation and Bose condensation of excitons. Detecting this exotic order in candidate materials is a subject of paramount importance, as the size of the excitonic gap in the band structure establishes the potential of this collective state for superfluid energy transport. However, the identification of this phase in real solids is hindered by the coexistence of a structural order parameter with the same symmetry as the excitonic order. Only a few materials are currently believed to host a dominant excitonic phase, Ta2NiSe5 being the most promising. Here, we test this scenario by using an ultrashort laser pulse to quench the broken-symmetry phase of this transition metal chalcogenide. Tracking the dynamics of the material's electronic and crystal structure after light excitation reveals spectroscopic fingerprints that are compatible only with a primary order parameter of phononic nature. We rationalize our findings through state-of-the-art calculations, confirming that the structural order accounts for most of the gap opening. Our results suggest that the spontaneous symmetry breaking in Ta2NiSe5 is mostly of structural character, hampering the possibility to realize quasi-dissipationless energy transport.
RESUMEN
Topological insulators (TIs) host novel states of quantum matter characterized by nontrivial conducting boundary states connecting valence and conduction bulk bands. All TIs discovered experimentally so far rely on either time-reversal or mirror crystal symmorphic symmetry to protect massless Dirac-like boundary states. Several materials were recently proposed to be TIs with nonsymmorphic symmetry, where a glide mirror protects exotic surface fermions with hourglass-shaped dispersion. However, an experimental confirmation of this new fermion is missing. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we provide experimental evidence of hourglass fermions on the (010) surface of crystalline KHgSb, whereas the (001) surface has no boundary state, in agreement with first-principles calculations. Our study will stimulate further research activities of topological properties of nonsymmorphic materials.
RESUMEN
In the studies of iron pnictides, a key question is whether their bad-metal state from which the superconductivity emerges lies in close proximity with a magnetically ordered insulating phase. Recently, it was found that at low temperatures, the heavily Cu-doped NaFe_{1-x}Cu_{x}As (x>0.3) iron pnictide is an insulator with long-range antiferromagnetic order, similar to the parent compound of cuprates but distinct from all other iron pnictides. Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we determined the momentum-resolved electronic structure of NaFe_{1-x}Cu_{x}As (x=0.44) and identified that its ground state is a narrow-gap insulator. Combining the experimental results with density functional theory (DFT) and DFT+U calculations, our analysis reveals that the on-site Coulombic (Hubbard) and Hund's coupling energies play crucial roles in the formation of the band gap about the chemical potential. We propose that at finite temperatures, charge carriers are thermally excited from the Cu-As-like valence band into the conduction band, which is of Fe 3d-like character. With increasing temperature, the number of electrons in the conduction band becomes larger and the hopping energy between Fe sites increases, and finally the long-range antiferromagnetic order is destroyed at T>T_{N}. Our study provides a basis for investigating the evolution of the electronic structure of a Mott insulator transforming into a bad metallic phase and eventually forming a superconducting state in iron pnictides.