Electronic states on the clean and oxygen-covered molybdenum (110) surface measured using time-of-flight momentum microscopy
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Abstract
Recent experiments discovered a new class of materials called topological insulators and started an extensive investigation in order to find more materials of such type and to understand and explore the opening perspectives in fundamental science and application. These materials exhibit a Dirac-type (massless) electronic state, bridging the fundamental band gap. Surprisingly, a strongly spin-polarized surface state with linear dispersion resembling that of Dirac type was found on the already well-investigated W(110) surface. This rose the question of the existence of the same non-trivial electron state on other metal surfaces.
The present work describes the investigation of surface electronic states on the Mo(110) surface, their dispersion and transformation upon surface oxidation. This system is isoelectronic to the case of W(110) but due to the lower atomic number the spin-orbit interaction responsible for local band gap formation is substantially decreased by a factor of 5. The Mo(110) surface was shown to exhibit a linearly dispersing state quite similar to the one on W(110), but within a smaller energy range of 120 meV, with the Dirac point lying in the center of a local band gap in k-space.
The experimental investigations were performed with the help of momentum microscopy, using a Ti:sapphire laser in the lab and synchrotron radiation at BESSY II, Berlin. The results show good agreement with theoretical calculations of the band structure and photoemission patterns for clean Mo(110).
The fully parallel 3D acquisition scheme allowed to visualize the full surface Brillouin zone of the sample up to few eV binding energy within a single exposure of typically less than 30 min. This opens the door to future time-resolved experiments with maximum detection efficiency.