Understanding Electronic Peculiarities in Tetragonal FeSe as Local Structural Symmetry Breaking

TL;DR

This study reveals that local symmetry breaking in tetragonal FeSe, uncovered through energy minimization in density functional theory, explains electronic anomalies and enhances understanding of its complex electronic structure beyond traditional diffraction-based models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that allowing for local symmetry breaking in DFT calculations uncovers intrinsic energy-lowering distortions in FeSe, providing new insights into its electronic properties.

Findings

Local symmetry breaking explains electronic anomalies in FeSe.

Energy minimization reveals static distortions not seen in diffraction.

Results align with spectral and local environment measurements.

Abstract

Traditional band theory of perfect crystalline solids often uses as input the structure deduced from diffraction experiments; when modeled by the minimal unit cell this often produces a spatially averaged model. The present study illustrates that this is not always a safe practice unless one examines if the intrinsic bonding mechanism is capable of benefiting from the formation of a distribution of lower symmetry local environments that differ from the macroscopically averaged structure. This can happen either due to positional, or due to magnetic symmetry breaking. By removing the constraint of a small crystallographic cell, the energy minimization in the density functional theory finds atomic and spin symmetry breaking, not evident in conventional diffraction experiments but being found by local probes such as pair distribution function analysis. Here we report that large atomic and electronic anomalies in bulk tetragonal FeSe emerge from the existence of distributions of local positional and magnetic moment motifs. The found symmetry-broken motifs obtained by minimization of the internal energy represent what chemical bonding in tetragonal phase prefers as an intrinsic energy lowering static distortions. This explains observations of band renormalization, predicts orbital order and enhanced nematicity, and provides unprecedented close agreement with spectral function measured by photoemission and local atomic environment revealed by pair distribution function. While the symmetry-restricted strong correlation approach has been argued previously to be the exclusive theory needed for describing the main peculiarities of FeSe, we show here that the symmetry-broken mean-field approach addresses numerous aspects of the problem, provides intuitive insight into the electronic structure, and opens the door for large-scale mean-field calculations for similar d-electron quantum materials.