We compute the tunneling conductance of graphene as measured by a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with a normal/superconducting tip. We demonstrate that for undoped graphene with zero Fermi energy, the first derivative of the tunneling conductance with respect to the applied voltage is proportional to the density of states of the STM tip. We also show that the shape of the STM spectra for graphene doped with impurities depends qualitatively on the position of the impurity atom in the graphene matrix and relate this unconventional phenomenon to the pseudopsin symmetry of the Dirac quasiparticles in graphene. We suggest experiments to test our theory.
We examine theoretically the signatures of magnetic adatoms in graphene probed by scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS). When the adatom hybridizes equally with the two graphene sublattices, the broadening of the local adatom level is anomalous and can scale with the cube of the energy. In contrast to ordinary metal surfaces, the adatom local moment can be suppressed by the proximity of the probing scanning tip. We propose that the dependence of the tunneling conductance on the distance between the tip and the adatom can provide a clear signature for the presence of local magnetic moments. We also show that tunneling conductance can distinguish whether the adatom is located on top of a carbon atom or in the center of a honeycomb hexagon.
We study the conductance of disordered graphene superlattices with short-range structural correlations. The system consists of electron- and hole-doped graphenes of various thicknesses, which fluctuate randomly around their mean value. The effect of the randomness on the probability of transmission through the system of various sizes is studied. We show that in a disordered superlattice the quasiparticle that approaches the barrier interface almost perpendicularly transmits through the system. The conductivity of the finite-size system is computed and shown that the conductance vanishes when the sample size becomes very large, whereas for some specific structures the conductance tends to a nonzero value in the thermodynamics limit.
Modern high-resolution microscopes, such as the scanning tunneling microscope, are commonly used to study specimens that have dense and aperiodic spatial structure. Extracting meaningful information from images obtained from such microscopes remains a formidable challenge. Fourier analysis is commonly used to analyze the underlying structure of fundamental motifs present in an image. However, the Fourier transform fundamentally suffers from severe phase noise when applied to aperiodic images. Here, we report the development of a new algorithm based on nonconvex optimization, applicable to any microscopy modality, that directly uncovers the fundamental motifs present in a real-space image. Apart from being quantitatively superior to traditional Fourier analysis, we show that this novel algorithm also uncovers phase sensitive information about the underlying motif structure. We demonstrate its usefulness by studying scanning tunneling microscopy images of a Co-doped iron arsenide superconductor and prove that the application of the algorithm allows for the complete recovery of quasiparticle interference in this material. Our phase sensitive quasiparticle interference imaging results indicate that the pairing symmetry in optimally doped NaFeAs is consistent with a sign-changing s+- order parameter.
We calculate the tunneling conductance of a graphene normal metal-insulator-superconductor (NIS) junction with a barrier of thickness $d$ and with an arbitrary voltage $V_0$ applied across the barrier region. We demonstrate that the tunneling conductance of such a NIS junction is an oscillatory function of both $d$ and $V_0$. We also show that the periodicity and amplitude of such oscillations deviate from their universal values in the thin barrier limit as obtained in earlier work [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 217001 (2006)] and become a function of the applied voltage $V_0$. Our results reproduces the earlier results on tunneling conductance of such junctions in the thin [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 217001 (2006)] and zero [Phys. Rev. Lett. {bf 97}, 067007 (2006)] barrier limits as special limiting cases. We discuss experimental relevance of our results.
Electronic nematic phases have been proposed to occur in various correlated electron systems and were recently claimed to have been detected in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) conductance maps of the pseudogap states of the cuprate high-temperature superconductor Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+x (Bi-2212). We investigate the influence of anisotropic STM tip structures on such measurements and establish, with a model calculation, the presence of a tunneling interference effect within an STM junction that induces energy-dependent symmetry-breaking features in the conductance maps. We experimentally confirm this phenomenon on different correlated electron systems, including measurements in the pseudogap state of Bi-2212, showing that the apparent nematic behavior of the imaged crystal lattice is likely not due to nematic order but is related to how a realistic STM tip probes the band structure of a material. We further establish that this interference effect can be used as a sensitive probe of changes in the momentum structure of the samples quasiparticles as a function of energy.