Rotation symmetry breaking in the normal state of a kagome superconductor KV3Sb5
By Hong Li, He Zhao, B. Ortiz, Ta-Ryeong Park, Mengxing Ye, L. Balents, Ziqiang Wang, Stephen D. Wilson, I. Zeljkovic. Nature Physics, 2021
267 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Recently discovered superconductors AV3Sb5 (A = K, Rb, Cs)1,2 provide a fresh opportunity to study correlation-driven electronic phenomena on a kagome lattice. The observation of an unusual charge density wave (CDW) in the normal state of all the members of the AV3Sb5 family2–10 has prompted a large effort to identify any ‘hidden’ broken symmetries associated with it. We use spectroscopic-imaging scanning tunnelling microscopy to reveal pronounced intensity anisotropy between the different directions of hexagonal CDW in KV3Sb5. In particular, we find that one of the CDW directions is distinctly different compared with the other two. This observation points to an intrinsic rotation-symmetry-broken electronic ground state where the symmetry is reduced from sixfold to twofold. Furthermore, in contrast to previous reports3, we find that the CDW phase is insensitive to the magnetic-field direction, regardless of the presence or absence of atomic defects. Our experiments, combined with earlier observations of stripe charge ordering in CsV3Sb5, establish correlation-driven rotation symmetry breaking as a unifying feature of AV3Sb5 kagome superconductors. The precise nature of the charge-density-wave state in kagome superconductors remains unclear. Now, local spectroscopy shows that rotational symmetry in real space is broken, with one direction being distinct from the other two.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dadfc01f449fbccf2212130fab7c3f2d8d8cb209
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Condensed Matter Physics
- Binghai Yan
- M. Zahid Hasan
- R. Fernandes
- Turan Birol
- M. Christensen
- Brian M. Andersen
- P. Dai
- L. Balents
In Materials Chemistry
Citations in the corpus
- Quantum states and intertwining phases in kagome materials (2023, background): “Differential conductance measurements from STM show that the energy modulation of the 2 a 0 × 2 a 0 CDW intensity along one direction is different from that of the other two directions at low temperature, thereby breaking C 6 rotational symmetry 30,117,119,120 .”
- Electronic nature of chiral charge order in the kagome superconductor CsV3Sb5 (2021, background): “Previous STM studies have resolved Sb honeycomb surfaces in AV3Sb5, and studied the charge order and surface superlattices [20-26].”
- Three-state nematicity and magneto-optical Kerr effect in the charge density waves in kagome superconductors (2022, background): “Our observation of two-fold symmetry and three-state nematicity just below T CDW is very different from the nematic order observed by STM in CsV 3 Sb 5 [31, 34] and KV 3 Sb 5 [28], which shows the nematic order at temperature much below T CDW .”
- Theory of the charge density wave in AV3Sb5 kagome metals (2021, background): “Recent experiments on kagome metals are consistent with a CDW state that doubles the unit cell in all directions (2×2×2 unit cell) and lowers the sixfold-rotational symmetry of the lattice to twofold [23, 24, 26, 31, 33].”