Physics Commons^™

Tunneling Into The Mott Insulator Sr2Iro4, John A. Nichols, Noah Bray-Ali, Armin Ansary, Gang Cao, Kwok-Wai Ng

Center for Advanced Materials Faculty Publications

We studied the single-layered iridate Sr₂IrO₄ with a scanning tunneling microscope. The finite low temperature conductance enables the electronic structure of this antiferromagnetic Mott insulator to be measured by tunneling spectroscopy. We imaged the topography of freshly cleaved surfaces and measured differential tunneling conductance at cryogenic temperatures. We found the Mott gap in the tunneling density of states to be 2Δ=615 meV. Within the Mott gap, additional shoulders are observed which are interpreted as inelastic loss features due to magnons.