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Scanning tunneling spectroscopic study of monolayer 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2

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Abstract

The isostructural and isoelectronic transition-metal-dichalcogenides 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2 are layered materials with intricate electronic structures. Combining the molecular beam epitaxy growth, scanning tunneling microscopy measurements and first-principles calculations, we prepare monolayer 1T-TaS2 and TaSe2 and explore their electronic structures at the atomic scale. Both two-dimensional (2D) compounds exhibit commensurate charge density wave phase at low temperature. The conductance mapping identifies the contributions from different Ta atoms to the local density of states with spatial and energy resolution. Both 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2 monolayer are shown to be insulators, while the former has a Mott gap and the latter is a regular band insulator.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11874233, 11622433, and 11574175) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Nos. 2016YFA0301002 and 2018YFA0305603).

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  1. Haicheng Lin and Wantong Huang contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Low Dimensional Quantum Physics and Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Haicheng Lin, Wantong Huang, Kun Zhao, Shuang Qiao, Jian Wu, Xi Chen & Shuai-Hua Ji

  2. Institute for Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Zheng Liu

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  1. Haicheng Lin
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Correspondence to Xi Chen or Shuai-Hua Ji.

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Lin, H., Huang, W., Zhao, K. et al. Scanning tunneling spectroscopic study of monolayer 1T-TaS2 and 1T-TaSe2. Nano Res. 13, 133–137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-019-2584-4

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