Orbital degrees of freedom in artificial electron lattices on a metal surface

Orbital degrees of freedom play a fundamental role in condensed matter physics and can be studied controllably in artificial lattices. Recently, a new kind of artificial electron lattice was realized in experiments by confining the metal surface electrons with an adsorbed molecular lattice. This ena...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review. B 2019-05, Vol.99 (20), p.205403, Article 205403
Main Authors: Ma, Liang, Qiu, Wen-Xuan, Lü, Jing-Tao, Gao, Jin-Hua
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer simulation
Condensed matter physics
Degrees of freedom
Electrons
First principles
Lattices (mathematics)
Metal surfaces
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Orbital degrees of freedom play a fundamental role in condensed matter physics and can be studied controllably in artificial lattices. Recently, a new kind of artificial electron lattice was realized in experiments by confining the metal surface electrons with an adsorbed molecular lattice. This enables the study of novel two-dimensional lattice structures. The Lieb lattice is one example which is of special interest due to its flat-band physics [M. R. Slot et al., Nat. Phys. 13, 672 (2017)]. Here, by first-principles simulation, muffin-tin potential, and tight-binding calculations, we demonstrate that the high-energy states observed in the experiment actually correspond to the artificial p orbitals of the electron lattice. Our numerical results, together with the experimental observation, show that the long-pursued artificial p-orbital fermionic lattice has already been realized in a solid-state system. This opens a new avenue to investigate the orbital degrees of freedom in a controllable way.
ISSN:2469-9950
2469-9969
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.99.205403