Unconventional chiral charge order in kagome superconductor KV3Sb5
By Yu-Xiao Jiang, Jia-Xin Yin, M. Denner, N. Shumiya, B. Ortiz, Gang Xu, Z. Guguchia, Junyi He, M. S. Hossain, Xiaoxiong Liu and 16 more. Nature Materials, 2020
768 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Intertwining quantum order and non-trivial topology is at the frontier of condensed matter physics1–4. A charge-density-wave-like order with orbital currents has been proposed for achieving the quantum anomalous Hall effect5,6 in topological materials and for the hidden phase in cuprate high-temperature superconductors7,8. However, the experimental realization of such an order is challenging. Here we use high-resolution scanning tunnelling microscopy to discover an unconventional chiral charge order in a kagome material, KV3Sb5, with both a topological band structure and a superconducting ground state. Through both topography and spectroscopic imaging, we observe a robust 2 × 2 superlattice. Spectroscopically, an energy gap opens at the Fermi level, across which the 2 × 2 charge modulation exhibits an intensity reversal in real space, signalling charge ordering. At the impurity-pinning-free region, the strength of intrinsic charge modulations further exhibits chiral anisotropy with unusual magnetic field response. Theoretical analysis of our experiments suggests a tantalizing unconventional chiral charge density wave in the frustrated kagome lattice, which can not only lead to a large anomalous Hall effect with orbital magnetism, but also be a precursor of unconventional superconductivity. An unconventional chiral charge order is observed in a kagome superconductor by scanning tunnelling microscopy. This charge order has unusual magnetic tunability and intertwines with electronic topology.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/629525bd24daf46e661ce4ab07ecba5c3bd1966a
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantum states and intertwining phases in kagome materials (2023, background): “Below T CDW , scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) studies, which are surface-sensitive, revealed an in-plane 2 a 0 × 2 a 0 superstructure (wavevector of Q 3q-2 a = 1/2 Q Bragg ) along all three directions of the kagome lattice on both the Sb and alkali surfaces 30,31,116–120 .”
- Electronic nature of chiral charge order in the kagome superconductor CsV3Sb5 (2021, background): “Similar to KV3Sb5 [28], we observe a soft charge order gap opening from −23 to +35 meV [Fig.”
- Theory of the charge density wave in AV3Sb5 kagome metals (2021, methodology): “It is also supported by x-ray diffraction which, in addition to the doubling along the a- and b-directions, find a unit cell increase along the c-direction [23, 27, 28].”