Quantum billiards with correlated electrons confined in triangular transition metal dichalcogenide monolayer nanostructures

Jan Ravnik (), Yevhenii Vaskivskyi, Jaka Vodeb, Polona Aupič, Igor Vaskivskyi, Denis Golež, Yaroslav Gerasimenko, Viktor Kabanov and Dragan Mihailovic ()
Additional contact information
Jan Ravnik: Jožef Stefan Institute
Yevhenii Vaskivskyi: Jožef Stefan Institute
Jaka Vodeb: Jožef Stefan Institute
Polona Aupič: Jožef Stefan Institute
Igor Vaskivskyi: Jožef Stefan Institute
Denis Golež: University of Ljubljana
Yaroslav Gerasimenko: CENN Nanocenter
Viktor Kabanov: Jožef Stefan Institute
Dragan Mihailovic: Jožef Stefan Institute

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Forcing systems through 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. The work opens the path toward understanding the quantum transport of electrons confined in atomic-scale monolayer structures based on correlated-electron-materials.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24073-0 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-24073-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24073-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().