Te 5p orbitals bring three-dimensional electronic structure to two-dimensional Ir0.95Pt0.05Te2

We have studied the nature of the three-dimensional multi-band electronic structure in the twodimensional triangular lattice Ir1-xPtxTe2 (x=0.05) superconductor using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES), x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) and band structure calculation. ARPES results clearly show a cylindrical (almost two-dimensional) Fermi surface around the zone center. Near the zone boundary, the cylindrical Fermi surface is truncated into several pieces in a complicated manner with strong three-dimensionality. The XPS result and the band structure calculation indicate that the strong Te 5p-Te 5p hybridization between the IrTe2 triangular lattice layers is responsible for the three-dimensionality of the Fermi surfaces and the intervening of the Fermi surfaces observed by ARPES.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Important Roles of Te 5p and Ir 5d Spin-orbit Interactions on the Multi-band Electronic Structure of Triangular Lattice Superconductor Ir1-xPtxTe2

We report an angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) study on a triangular lattice superconductor Ir$_{1-x}$Pt$_{x}$Te$_2$ in which the Ir-Ir or Te-Te bond formation, the band Jahn-Teller effect, and the spin-orbit interaction are cooperating and competing with one another. The Fermi surfaces of the substituted system are qualitatively similar to the band structure calculations for the undistorted IrTe$_2$ with an upward chemical potential shift due to electron doping. A combination of the ARPES and the band structure calculations indicates that the Te $5p$ spin-orbit interaction removes the $p_x/p_y$ orbital degeneracy and induces $p_x \pm ip_y$ type spin-orbit coupling near the A point. The inner and outer Fermi surfaces are entangled by the Te $5p$ and Ir $5d$ spin-orbit interactions which may provide exotic superconductivity with singlet-triplet mixing.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Peierls Mechanism of the Metal-Insulator Transition in Ferromagnetic Hollandite K2Cr8O16

Synchrotron X-ray diffraction experiment shows that the metal-insulator transition occurring in a ferromagnetic state of a hollandite K$_2$Cr$_8$O$_{16}$ is accompanied by a structural distortion from the tetragonal $I4/m$ to monoclinic $P112_{1}/a$ phase with a $\sqrt{2}\times\sqrt{2}\times 1$ supercell. Detailed electronic structure calculations demonstrate that the metal-insulator transition is caused by a Peierls instability in the quasi-one-dimensional column structure made of four coupled Cr-O chains running in the $c$-direction, leading to the formation of tetramers of Cr ions below the transition temperature. This furnishes a rare example of the Peierls transition of fully spin-polarized electron systems.Comment: Phys. Rev. Lett., in press, 5 pages, 3 figure

Excitonic Bose-Einstein condensation in Ta2NiSe5 above room temperature

We show that finite temperature variational cluster approximation (VCA) calculations on an extended Falicov-Kimball model can reproduce angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) results on Ta2NiSe5 across a semiconductor-to-semiconductor structural phase transition at 325 K. We demonstrate that the characteristic temperature dependence of the flat-top valence band observed by ARPES is reproduced by the VCA calculation on the realistic model for an excitonic insulator only when the strong excitonic fluctuation is taken into account. The present calculations indicate that Ta2NiSe5 falls in the Bose-Einstein condensation regime of the excitonic insulator state.Comment: 21 pages(5 figures

Synchronous Symmetry Breaking in Neurons with Different Neurite Counts

As neurons develop, several immature processes (i.e., neurites) grow out of the cell body. Over time, each neuron breaks symmetry when only one of its neurites grows much longer than the rest, becoming an axon. This symmetry breaking is an important step in neurodevelopment, and aberrant symmetry breaking is associated with several neuropsychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia and autism. However, the effects of neurite count in neuronal symmetry breaking have never been studied. Existing models for neuronal polarization disagree: some predict that neurons with more neurites polarize up to several days later than neurons with fewer neurites, while others predict that neurons with different neurite counts polarize synchronously. We experimentally find that neurons with different neurite counts polarize synchronously. We also show that despite the significant differences among the previously proposed models, they all agree with our experimental findings when the expression levels of the proteins responsible for symmetry breaking increase with neurite count. Consistent with these results, we observe that the expression levels of two of these proteins, HRas and shootin1, significantly correlate with neurite count. This coordinated symmetry breaking we observed among neurons with different neurite counts may be important for synchronized polarization of neurons in developing organisms