Fermion-boson many-body interplay in a frustrated kagome paramagnet

TL;DR

This study uncovers the strong interaction between fermionic electrons and bosonic flat-band phonons in a kagome paramagnet, revealing a novel many-body interplay in a geometrically frustrated lattice.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence of a kagome bosonic mode interacting with electrons, combining advanced microscopy, spectroscopy, and theoretical analysis.

Findings

Observation of bosonic mode interacting with dispersive electrons

Pronounced fermionic dispersion renormalization near mode energy

Identification of flat-band phonons as the bosonic mode

Abstract

Kagome-net, appearing in areas of fundamental physics, materials, photonic and cold-atom systems, hosts frustrated fermionic and bosonic excitations. However, it is extremely rare to find a system to study both fermionic and bosonic modes to gain insights into their many-body interplay. Here we use state-of-the-art scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to discover unusual electronic coupling to flat-band phonons in a layered kagome paramagnet. Our results reveal the kagome structure with unprecedented atomic resolution and observe the striking bosonic mode interacting with dispersive kagome electrons near the Fermi surface. At this mode energy, the fermionic quasi-particle dispersion exhibits a pronounced renormalization, signaling a giant coupling to bosons. Through a combination of self-energy analysis, first-principles calculation, and a lattice vibration model, we present evidence that this mode arises from the geometrically frustrated phonon flat-band, which is the lattice analog of kagome electron flat-band. Our findings provide the first example of kagome bosonic mode (flat-band phonon) in electronic excitations and its strong interaction with fermionic degrees of freedom in kagome-net materials.