Extracting Quasiparticle Lifetimes from STM experiments

TL;DR

This paper presents a new analysis method to determine quasiparticle lifetimes from STM data by analyzing quasiparticle interference around impurities, complementing existing spectroscopic techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme that uses LDOS data around impurities in STM to extract quasiparticle lifetimes, enhancing the capabilities of current spectroscopic methods.

Findings

Applicable to metals, Fermi liquids, and superconductors.

Provides a way to use impurities as probes for quasiparticle lifetimes.

Complements ARPES with STM-based lifetime measurements.

Abstract

Based on Quasiparticle Interference(QPI) around a point impurity, we demonstrate an analysis scheme that extracts the lifetime of a quasiparticle by using the Local Density of States(LDOS) data around the impurity in a Scanning Tunneling Microscopy(STM) experiment. This data analysis scheme would augment the Fourier-Transform Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopic method which provides us with the quasiparticle dispersion. Thus, point impurities can be used as probes to extract quasiparticle lifetimes from STM experiments and this would complement other experimental methods such as Angle Resolved Photo-emission Spectrocopy(ARPES). We detail how the scheme would apply to conventional metals/Fermi Liquids and Superconductors.