Shantanu Mishra^1,2*, Gonçalo Catarina^3,4, Fupeng Wu⁵, Ricardo Ortiz⁴, David Jacob^6,7, Kristjan Eimre^1*, Ji Ma⁵, Carlo A. Pignedoli¹, Xinliang Feng^5,8, Pascal Ruffieux^1*, Joaquín Fernández-Rossier³, Roman Fasel^1,9

1 Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Überlandstrasse 129, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland

2 Present address: IBM Research – Zurich, Rüschlikon, Switzerland

3 International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory, Braga, Portugal

4 University of Alicante, Sant Vicent del Raspeig, Spain

5 Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany

6 University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain

7 IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain

8 Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany

9 University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

* Corresponding authors emails: SHM@zurich.ibm.com, kristjan.eimre@empa.ch, pascal.ruffieux@empa.ch

DOI10.24435/materialscloud:e8-aq [version v1]

Publication date: Oct 11, 2021

How to cite this record

Shantanu Mishra, Gonçalo Catarina, Fupeng Wu, Ricardo Ortiz, David Jacob, Kristjan Eimre, Ji Ma, Carlo A. Pignedoli, Xinliang Feng, Pascal Ruffieux, Joaquín Fernández-Rossier, Roman Fasel, Observation of fractional edge excitations in nanographene spin chains, Materials Cloud Archive 2021.161 (2021), doi: 10.24435/materialscloud:e8-aq.

Description

Fractionalization is a phenomenon in which strong interactions in a quantum system drive the emergence of excitations with quantum numbers that are absent in the building blocks. Outstanding examples are excitations with charge e/3 in the fractional quantum Hall effect, solitons in one-dimensional conducting polymers and Majorana states in topological superconductors. Fractionalization is also predicted to manifest itself in low-dimensional quantum magnets, such as one-dimensional antiferromagnetic S = 1 chains. The fundamental features of this system are gapped excitations in the bulk and, remarkably, S = 1/2 edge states at the chain termini, leading to a four-fold degenerate ground state that reflects the underlying symmetry-protected topological order. This record contains data to support the result in a recent publication of ours where we use on-surface synthesis to fabricate one-dimensional spin chains that contain the S = 1 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon triangulene as the building block. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy at 4.5 K, we probe length-dependent magnetic excitations at the atomic scale in both open-ended and cyclic spin chains, and directly observe gapped spin excitations and fractional edge states therein. Exact diagonalization calculations provide conclusive evidence that the spin chains are described by the S = 1 bilinear-biquadratic Hamiltonian in the Haldane symmetry-protected topological phase. Our results open a bottom-up approach to study strongly correlated phases in purely organic materials, with the potential for the realization of measurement-based quantum computation.

Materials Cloud sections using this data

Files

File name	Size	Description
ReadMe.yaml MD5md5:6242eda3d8e18dd69a4141bb2f3e22d3	73.9 KiB	ReadME file in yaml format detailing the content of the record
data.tgz MD5md5:9b3f9cfd90a5b645e522154c0327114e	59.4 MiB	Compressed tar file containing the experimental data and the gw calculations of the record
band-and-geo-calculations.aiida MD5md5:a160ddf10bb8044c2394c3cc8ace49ef Open this AiiDA archive on renkulab.io (https://renkulab.io/)	13.2 GiB	Archive of AiiDA nodes of the bandstructure calculations

License

Files and data are licensed under the terms of the following license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.
Metadata, except for email addresses, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International license.

External references

Keywords

spin chains nanographene fractionalization Graphene flagship MARVEL/DD3 ERC CSCS H2020 SNSF