Nanowerk May 18, 2020
Researchers in Japan created crystals of tantalum disulfide and then cleaved the crystals in a vacuum to reveal ultra-clean surfaces which they examined, at a temperature close to absolute zero. Using quantum tunneling they studied the degree of conducting behavior of the material. The results showed that there was indeed a stacking of layers which effectively arranged them into pairs. Sometimes the crystals cleaved between the pairs of layers, and sometimes through a pair, breaking it. They performed spectroscopy on both the paired and unpaired layers and found that even the unpaired ones are insulating, leaving Mottness as the only explanation. Future work may help us to find new interesting and useful phenomena emerging from Mottness, such as high-temperature superconductivity…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Overview of charge order, inter-layer stacking and cleaved surfaces in 1T-TaS2. Credit: Nature Communications volume 11, Article number: 2477 (2020)