Interweaving Polar Charge Orders in a Layered Metallic Super-atomic Crystal

Title

Interweaving Polar Charge Orders in a Layered Metallic Super-atomic Crystal

Speaker

Wei Ji (Beijing Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Functional Materials & Micro-nano Devices, Department of Physics, Renmin University of China)

Host

Prof. Kai Huang (GTIIT, Chemistry)

Time and Location

Aug. 11 2022, Thursday, 10:00am-11:00am(China Time), E311 (Education Building, 3rd floor)

Language

Chinese

Abstract

Electronic properties of super-atomic crystals are far from being well explored in the case of their versatile building units and premature understanding of their inter-unit couplings. Here, we experiment-theory jointly investigated a rational-designed layered super-atomic crystal of Au6Te12Se8 cubes, stacked by non-covalent intercube quasi-bonds. We found a sequential-emerged anisotropic triple-cube charge-density-wave (tc-CDW) and polarized metallic states below 120 K, as examined via scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, transport measurement, Raman spectra, and density functional theory. The polarized states are locked in an anti-parallel configuration, required by maintaining the inversion symmetry of the center-cube in the tc-CDW. The anti-polar metallic states are thus interweaved by the charge-density-wave and the polarized metallic states, and primarily ascribed to electronic effects via theoretical calculations. This work not only demonstrate a microscopic picture of the interweaved CDW and polarized charge orders in the super-atomic crystal of ATS, also shed considerable light on expanding the existing category of quantum materials to non-covalent solids.