Nanoscale decoupling of electronic nematicity and structural anisotropy in FeSe thin films.

ABSTRACT: In a material prone to a nematic instability, anisotropic strain in principle provides a preferred symmetry-breaking direction for the electronic nematic state to follow. This is consistent with experimental observations, where electronic nematicity and structural anisotropy typically appear hand-in-hand. In this work, we discover that electronic nematicity can be locally decoupled from the underlying structural anisotropy in strain-engineered iron-selenide (FeSe) thin films. We use heteroepitaxial molecular beam epitaxy to grow FeSe with a nanoscale network of modulations that give rise to spatially varying strain. We map local anisotropic strain by analyzing scanning tunneling microscopy topographs, and visualize electronic nematic domains from concomitant spectroscopic maps. While the d

SUBMITTER: Ren Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7782804 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature