Stabilization and Manipulation of Electronically Phase-Separated Ground States in Defective Indium Atom Wires on Silicon

Abstract

Exploration and manipulation of electronic states in low-dimensional systems are of great importance in the fundamental and practical aspects of nanomaterial and nanotechnology. Here, we demonstrate that the incorporation of vacancy defects into monatomic indium wires on n-type Si(111) can stabilize electronically phase-separated ground states where the insulating 8 x 2 and metallic 4 x 1 phases coexist. Furthermore, the areal ratio of the two phases in the phase-separated states can be tuned reversibly by electric field or charge doping, and such tunabilities can be quantitatively captured by first principles-based modeling and simulations. The present results extend the realm of electronic phase separation from strongly correlated d-electron materials typically in bulk form to weakly interacting sp-electron systems in reduced dimensionality.