1. Layer-Confined Excitonic Insulating Phase in Ultrathin Ta2NiSe5 Crystals
- Author
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Chibeom Park, Tae-Hwan Kim, Byung Il Min, Hee Cheul Choi, Jun Sung Kim, Man Jin Eom, Youngwook Kim, Hyoung Kug Kim, Soyoung Kim, Eun-Su An, Minkyung Lee, and Chang-Jong Kang
- Subjects
Materials science ,Condensed matter physics ,Transition temperature ,Scanning tunneling spectroscopy ,General Engineering ,General Physics and Astronomy ,Insulator (electricity) ,02 engineering and technology ,Electron ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,01 natural sciences ,Condensed Matter::Materials Science ,symbols.namesake ,0103 physical sciences ,symbols ,General Materials Science ,Direct and indirect band gaps ,Wave vector ,van der Waals force ,010306 general physics ,0210 nano-technology ,Raman spectroscopy - Abstract
Atomically thin nanosheets, as recently realized using van der Waals layered materials, offer a versatile platform for studying the stability and tunability of the correlated electron phases in the reduced dimension. Here, we investigate a thickness-dependent excitonic insulating (EI) phase on a layered ternary chalcogenide Ta2NiSe5. Using Raman spectroscopy, scanning tunneling spectroscopy, and in-plane transport measurements, we found no significant changes in crystalline and electronic structures as well as disorder strength in ultrathin Ta2NiSe5 crystals with a thickness down to five layers. The transition temperature, Tc, of ultrathin Ta2NiSe5 is reduced from its bulk value by ΔTc/Tc(bulk) ≈ -9%, which strongly contrasts the case of 1T-TiSe2, another excitonic insulator candidate, showing an increase of Tc by ΔTc/Tc(bulk) ≈ +30%. This difference is attributed to the dominance of interband Coulomb interaction over electron-phonon interaction and its zero-ordering wave vector due to the direct band gap structure of Ta2NiSe5. The out-of-plane correlating length of the EI phase is estimated to have monolayer thickness, suggesting that the EI phase in Ta2NiSe5 is highly layer-confined and in the strong coupling limit.
- Published
- 2016