Imaging gate-tunable Tomonaga–Luttinger liquids in 1H-MoSe₂ mirror twin boundaries

Journal Article · Thu Jun 16 00:00:00 EDT 2022 · Nature Materials

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01277-3· OSTI ID:1881896

Zhu, Tiancong ^[1]; Ruan, Wei ^[2]; Wang, Yan-Qi ^[1]; Tsai, Hsin-Zon ^[3]; Wang, Shuopei ^[4]; Zhang, Canxun ^[5]; Wang, Tianye ^[1]; Liou, Franklin ^[5]; Watanabe, Kenji ^[6]; Taniguchi, Takashi ^[6]; Neaton, Jeffrey B. ^[1]; Weber-Bargioni, Alexander ^[7]; Zettl, Alex ^[1]; Qiu, Z. Q. ^[1]; Zhang, Guangyu ^[8]; Wang, Feng ^[1]; Moore, Joel E. ^[1]; Crommie, Michael F. ^[1]

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1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Fudan Univ., Shanghai (China)
3. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
4. Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China); Songshan Lake Materials Lab., Dongguan (China)
5. Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
6. National Inst. for Materials Science, Tsukuba (Japan)
7. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
8. Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China); Songshan Lake Materials Lab., Dongguan (China); Univ. of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China)

One-dimensional electron systems exhibit fundamentally different properties than higher-dimensional systems. For example, electron-electron interactions in one-dimensional electron systems have been predicted to induce Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid behaviour. Naturally occurring grain boundaries in single-layer transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit one-dimensional conducting channels that have been proposed to host Tomonaga-Luttinger liquids, but charge density wave physics has also been suggested to explain their behaviour. Clear identification of the electronic ground state of this system has been hampered by an inability to electrostatically gate such boundaries and tune their charge carrier concentration. Here we present a scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy study of gate-tunable mirror twin boundaries in single-layer 1H-MoSe₂ devices. Gating enables scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy for different mirror twin boundary electron densities, thus allowing precise characterization of electron-electron interaction effects. Visualization of the resulting mirror twin boundary electronic structure allows unambiguous identification of collective density wave excitations having two velocities, in quantitative agreement with the spin-charge separation predicted by finite-length Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid theory.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: Directorate for Mathematical & Physical Sciences; Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation; Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; National Research Foundation of Korea; USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1881896
• Journal Information: Nature Materials, Journal Name: Nature Materials Journal Issue: 7 Vol. 21; ISSN 1476-1122
• Publisher: Springer Nature - Nature Publishing Group
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE
Electronic properties and materials
Quantum fluids and solids