Abstract
In van der Waals materials, coupling between adjacent layers is weak, and consequently interlayer interactions are weakly screened. This opens the possibility to profoundly modify the electronic structure, e.g., by applying electric fields or with adsorbates. Here, we show for the case of the topologically trivial semimetal 1T′-MoTe2 that potassium dosing at room temperature significantly transforms its band structure. With a combination of angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy, X-ray photoemission spectroscopy, and density functional theory we show that (i) for small concentrations of K, 1T′-MoTe2 undergoes a Lifshitz transition with the electronic structure shifting rigidly, and (ii) for larger K concentrations 1T′-MoTe2 undergoes significant band structure transformation. Our results demonstrate that the origin of this electronic structure change stems from alkali metal intercalation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 5065-5074 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Journal of Physical Chemistry C |
| Volume | 129 |
| Issue number | 10 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 13 2025 |
Funding
This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant no. NSF CHE-1954571 and by the College of Science of the University of Arizona. Oliver Monti gratefully acknowledges support from the Carl Zeiss Stiftung for a visiting professorship at the Friedrich Schiller Universita\u0308t Jena. Joohyung Park, Ayan N. Batyrkhanov, and Oliver L. A. Monti appreciate Paul Lee for technical help in the initial potassium deposition setup. This task was carried out at the University of Arizona Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Laboratory for Electron Spectroscopy and Surface Analysis (LESSA) Facility, RRID:SCR_022885. Florian Go\u0308ltl thanks the College of Agriculture and Life Science at the University of Arizona for their support. We acknowledge computational time at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy, contract DE-AC02-05CH11231. The STM data set was collected at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), which is a U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science User Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. J. Brandhoff acknowledges financial support through a PhD scholarship from the Landesgraduiertenstipendium funded by the State of Thuringia.