k-Resolved electronic structure of buried heterostructure and impurity systems by soft-X-ray ARPES

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how soft-X-ray ARPES enables detailed investigation of the electronic structure of buried heterostructures and impurities, revealing quantum states, bosonic interactions, and magnetic impurity effects crucial for advanced electronics.

Contribution

It introduces the application of SX-ARPES to probe buried heterostructures and impurities, providing new insights into their electronic properties.

Findings

Buried quantum-well states identified in heterostructures

Bosonic coupling effects on electron transport observed

Magnetic impurities characterized in semiconductors

Abstract

Angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) is the main experimental tool to explore electronic structure of solids resolved in the electron momentum k . Soft-X-ray ARPES (SX-ARPES), operating in a photon energy range around 1 keV, benefits from enhanced probing depth compared to the conventional VUV-range ARPES, and elemental/chemical state specificity achieved with resonant photoemission. These advantages make SX-ARPES ideally suited for buried heterostructure and impurity systems, which are at the heart of current and future electronics. These applications are illustrated here with a few pioneering results, including buried quantum-well states in semiconductor and oxide heterostructures, their bosonic coupling critically affecting electron transport, magnetic impurities in diluted magnetic semiconductors and topological materials, etc. High photon flux and detection efficiency are crucial for pushing the SX-ARPES experiment to these most photon-hungry cases.