Heavy d-Electron Quasiparticle Interference and Real-space Electronic Structure of Sr3Ru2O7

TL;DR

This paper explores the real-space electronic structure of Sr3Ru2O7, a material with heavy d-electron quasiparticles, using spectroscopic imaging techniques to visualize its complex quantum phases and electronic inhomogeneities.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of SI-STM to image heavy electron states and electronic liquid crystalline phases in Sr3Ru2O7, advancing understanding of strongly correlated electron systems.

Findings

Visualization of heavy d-electron quasiparticles

Observation of field-induced electronic liquid crystalline phase

Identification of spatial inhomogeneities in electronic structure

Abstract

The intriguing idea that strongly interacting electrons can generate spatially inhomogeneous electronic liquid crystalline phases is over a decade old, but these systems still represent an unexplored frontier of condensed matter physics. One reason is that visualization of the many-body quantum states generated by the strong interactions, and of the resulting electronic phases, has not been achieved. Soft condensed matter physics was transformed by microscopies that allowed imaging of real-space structures and patterns. A candidate technique for obtaining equivalent data in the purely electronic systems is Spectroscopic Imaging Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (SI-STM). The core challenge is to detect the tenuous but 'heavy' k-space components of the many-body electronic state simultaneously with its r-space constituents. Sr3Ru2O7 provides a particularly exciting opportunity to address these issues. It possesses (i) a very strongly renormalized 'heavy' d-electron Fermi liquid and (ii) exhibits a field-induced transition to an electronic liquid crystalline phase. Finally, as a layered compound, it can be cleaved to present an excellent surface for SI-STM.