No Arabic abstract
Honeycomb structures of group IV elements can host massless Dirac fermions with non-trivial Berry phases. Their potential for electronic applications has attracted great interest and spurred a broad search for new Dirac materials especially in monolayer structures. We present a detailed investigation of the beta 12 boron sheet, which is a borophene structure that can form spontaneously on a Ag(111) surface. Our tight-binding analysis revealed that the lattice of the beta 12-sheet could be decomposed into two triangular sublattices in a way similar to that for a honeycomb lattice, thereby hosting Dirac cones. Furthermore, each Dirac cone could be split by introducing periodic perturbations representing overlayer-substrate interactions. These unusual electronic structures were confirmed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and validated by first-principles calculations. Our results suggest monolayer boron as a new platform for realizing novel high-speed low-dissipation devices.
Dirac semimetal (DSM) is a phase of matter, whose elementary excitation is described by the relativistic Dirac equation. Its parity-time symmetry enforces the linear-dispersed Dirac cone in the momentum space to be non-chiral, leading to surface states connected adiabatically to a topologically trivial surface state. Inspired by the flavor symmetry in particle physics, we theoretically propose a massless chiral Dirac equation linking two Weyl fields with the identical chirality by assuming SU(2) isospin symmetry, independent of the space-time rotation exchanging the two fields. Dramatically, such symmetry is hidden in certain solid-state spin-1/2 systems with negligible spin-orbit coupling, where the spin degree of freedom is decoupled with the lattice. Therefore, it cannot be explained by the conventional (magnetic) space group framework. The corresponding system is called chiral DSM. The four-fold degenerate Dirac fermion manifests linear dispersion and a Chern number of +2/-2, leading to a robust network of topologically protected Fermi arcs throughout the Brillouin zone. For material realization, we show that the transition-metal chalcogenide CoNb3S6 with experimentally confirmed collinear antiferromagnetic order is ideal for chiral DSM. Our work unprecedentedly reveals a condensed-matter counterpart of the flavor symmetry in particle physics, leading to further possibilities of emergent phenomena in quantum materials.
Hyperbolic materials are receiving significant attention due to their ability to support electromagnetic fields with arbitrarily high momenta and, hence, to achieve very strong light confinement. Here, based on first-principles calculations and many-body perturbation theory, we explore the characteristic of two-dimensional plasmon modes and its hyperbolic properties for two phases of single layer boron hosting tilted Dirac cone, namely, the $hr$-$sB$ and $8Pmmn$ borophene. In-plane anisotropy in borophene is manifested in the structural, electronic, vibrational and optical properties. We find two hyperbolic regimes for both phases of borophene, where the high-energy one is located in the visible range. The $hr$-$sB$ borophene is characterised with an intrinsic high carrier density and it supports strong hyperbolic plasmon modes in the visible part of the spectrum. The $8Pmmn$ borophene, on the other hand, resembles the prototypical Dirac material graphene, and upon carrier doping acquires anisotropic Dirac plasmons in the mid-infrared. We have also investigated the impact of the electron-phonon coupling and Landau damping on these hyperbolic plasmon modes. Our results show that borophene, having high anisotropy, intrinsic high carrier concentration, low-loss hyperbolic Dirac plasmon modes, and high confinement can represent a promising candidate for low-loss broad band surface plasmon polariton devices.
The analogues of elementary particles have been extensively searched for in condensed matter systems because of both scientific interests and technological applications. Recently massless Dirac fermions were found to emerge as low energy excitations in the materials named Dirac semimetals. All the currently known Dirac semimetals are nonmagnetic with both time-reversal symmetry $mathcal{T}$ and inversion symmetry $mathcal{P}$. Here we show that Dirac fermions can exist in one type of antiferromagnetic systems, where $mathcal{T}$ and $mathcal{P}$ are broken but their combination $mathcal{PT}$ is respected. We propose orthorhombic antiferromagnet CuMnAs as a candidate, analyze the robustness of the Dirac points with symmetry protections, and demonstrate its distinctive bulk dispersions as well as the corresponding surface states by emph{ab initio} calculations. Our results give a new route towards the realization of Dirac materials, and provide a possible platform to study the interplay of Dirac fermion physics and magnetism.
We investigate the ultrafast relaxation dynamics of hot Dirac fermionic quasiparticles in multilayer epitaxial graphene using ultrafast optical differential transmission spectroscopy. We observe DT spectra which are well described by interband transitions with no electron-hole interaction. Following the initial thermalization and emission of high-energy phonons, the electron cooling is determined by electron-acoustic phonon scattering, found to occur on the time scale of 1 ps for highly doped layers, and 4-11 ps in undoped layers. The spectra also provide strong evidence for the multilayer stucture and doping profile of thermally grown epitaxial graphene on SiC.
Using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and density functional theory (DFT) we study the electronic structure of layered BaZnBi$_2$. Our experimental results show no evidence of Dirac states in BaZnBi$_2$ originated either from the bulk or the surface. The calculated band structure without spin-orbit interaction shows several linear dispersive band crossing points throughout the Brillouin zone. However, as soon as the spin-orbit interaction is turned on, the band crossing points are significantly gapped out. The experimental observations are in good agreement with our DFT calculations. These observations suggest that the Dirac fermions in BaZnBi$_2$ are trivial and massive. We also observe experimentally that the electronic structure of BaZnBi$_2$ comprises of several linear dispersive bands in the vicinity of Fermi level dispersing to a wider range of binding energy.