Fermion–boson many-body interplay in a frustrated kagome paramagnet
Abstract
Kagome-nets, appearing in electronic, photonic and cold-atom systems, host frustrated fermionic and bosonic excitations. However, it is rare to find a system to study their fermion–boson many-body interplay. Here we use state-of-the-art scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy to discover unusual electronic coupling to flat-band phonons in a layered kagome paramagnet, CoSn. We image the kagome structure with unprecedented atomic resolution and observe the striking bosonic mode interacting with dispersive kagome electrons near the Fermi surface. At this mode energy, the fermionic quasi-particle dispersion exhibits a pronounced renormalization, signaling a giant coupling to bosons. Through the self-energy analysis, first-principles calculation, and a lattice vibration model, we present evidence that this mode arises from the geometrically frustrated phonon flat-band, which is the lattice bosonic analog of the kagome electron flat-band. Our findings provide the first example of kagome bosonic mode (flat-band phonon) in electronic excitations and its strong interaction with fermionic degrees of freedom in kagome-net materials.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 10, 2020
- Source ID
- 10.1038/s41467-020-17464-2
Entities
People
- Amit Agarwal
- Ching-Wu Chu
- Daniel Multer
- Desheng Wu
- Guangming Cheng
- Guoqing Chang
- Hechang Lei
- Hung-Ju Tien
- Jia-Xin Yin
- Kun Jiang
- Liangzi Deng
- M. Zahid Hasan
- Nan Yao
- Nana Shumiya
- Qi Wang
- Rui He
- Shangfei Wu
- Songtian Zhang
- Sougata Mardanya
- Tay-Rong Chang
- Titus Neupert
- Yuxiao Jiang
- Zhipeng Ye
- Zhonghao Liu
- Ziqiang Wang
Organizations
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation