Fermi surface nesting and the origin of charge density waves in metals
By Michael Johannes, I. Mazin. 2007
455 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The concept of a charge density wave (CDW), which is induced by Fermi-surface nesting, originated from the Peierls idea of electronic instabilities in purely one-dimensional metals and is now often applied to charge ordering in real low-dimensional materials. The idea is that if Fermi surface contours coincide when shifted along the observed CDW wave vector, then the CDW is considered to be nesting derived. We show that, in most cases, this procedure has no predictive power, since Fermi surfaces either do not nest at the right wave vector or nest more strongly at the wrong vector. We argue that only a tiny fraction, if any, of the observed charge ordering phase transitions are true analogs of the Peierls instability because electronic instabilities are easily destroyed by even small deviations from perfect nesting conditions. By using prototypical CDW materials ${\text{NbSe}}_{2}$, ${\text{TaSe}}_{2}$, and ${\text{CeTe}}_{3}$, we show that such conditions are hardly ever fulfilled and that the CDW phases are actually structural phase transitions driven by the concerted action of electronic and ionic subsystems, i.e., a $\mathbf{q}$-dependent electron-phonon coupling plays an indispensable part. We also mathematically show that the original Peierls construction is so fragile that it is unlikely to apply to real materials. We argue that no meaningful distinction between a CDW and an incommensurate lattice transition exists.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf0476b12cff85d5845337e26cb0c85cc1e64e94
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Emergence of charge density wave domain walls above the superconducting dome in 1T-TiSe2 (2013, methodology): “In the literature, the term CDW may be used in different senses [19] but in this thesis, it is used to refer to the charge modulation due to Peierl instability.”