Tuning the Mottness in Sr_(3)Ir_(2)O_(7)via Bridging Oxygen Vacancies

The electronic evolution of Mott insulators into exotic correlated phases remains puzzling,because of electron interaction and inhomogeneity.Introduction of individual imperfections in Mott insulators could help capture the main mechanism and serve as a basis to understand the evolution.Here we utilize scanning tunneling microscopy to probe the atomic scale electronic structure of the spin-orbit-coupling assisted Mott insulator Sr_(3)Ir_(2)O_(7).It is found that the tunneling spectra exhibit a homogeneous Mott gap in defect-free regions,but near the oxygen vacancy in the rotated Ir O_(2)plane the local Mott gap size is significantly enhanced.We attribute the enhanced gap to the locally reduced hopping integral between the 5d electrons of neighboring Ir sites via the bridging planar oxygen p orbitals.Such bridging defects have a dramatic influence on local bandwidth,thus provide a new way to manipulate the strength of Mottness in a Mott insulator.

Temperature Dependence of the Electronic Structure of Ca_(3)Cu_(2)O_(4)Cl_(2) Mott Insulator

We use scanning tunneling microscopy to study the temperature evolution of electronic structure in Ca_(3)Cu_(2)O_(4)Cl_(2) parent Mott insulator of cuprates. It is found that the upper Hubbard band moves towards the Fermi energy with increasing temperature, while the charge transfer band remains basically unchanged. This leads to a reduction of the charge transfer gap size at high temperatures, and the rate of reduction is much faster than that of conventional semiconductors. Across the Neel temperature for antiferromagnetic order, there is no sudden change in the electronic structure. These results shed new light on the theoretical models about the parent Mott insulator of cuprates.

Imaging the atomic-scale electronic states induced by a pair of hole dopants in Ca_(2)CuO_(2)Cl_(2) Mott insulator

We use scanning tunneling microscopy to visualize the atomic-scale electronic states induced by a pair of hole dopants in Ca_(2)CuO_(2)Cl_(2)parent Mott insulator of cuprates.We find that when the two dopants approach each other,the transfer of spectral weight from high energy Hubbard band to low energy ingap state creates a broad peak and nearly V-shaped gap around the Fermi level.The peak position shows a sudden drop at distance around 4 a_(0)and then remains almost constant.The in-gap states exhibit peculiar spatial distributions depending on the configuration of the two dopants relative to the underlying Cu lattice.These results shed important new lights on the evolution of low energy electronic states when a few holes are doped into parent cuprates.