The absence of surface states for LiFeAs

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that LiFeAs's neutral cleaved surface minimally affects its electronic states, ensuring surface-sensitive measurements like ARPES accurately reflect its bulk electronic structure.

Contribution

It provides a detailed density functional analysis showing the negligible surface influence on LiFeAs's electronic structure, validating surface probe data as representative of the bulk.

Findings

Surface of LiFeAs remains neutral after cleaving

Surface states have minimal impact on electronic structure

ARPES data closely matches bulk calculations

Abstract

We investigate the cleaving behavior of LiFeAs and determine its surface electronic structure by detailed density functional calculations. We show that due to the neutral surface of LiFeAs after cleaving, barely any influence of the surface on the electronic states is present. Therefore the data of surface sensitive probes such as angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) represent to a high degree the bulk electronic structure. This we highlighted by a direct comparison of the calculations to ARPES spectra.