Multifractal wavefunctions of a disordered electron gas imaged with the STM

We just posted our manuscript on ‘Visualizing the multifractal wavefunctions of a disordered two-dimensional electron gas’ on the arXiv. This work beautifully illustrates the potential of STM experiments to visualize the microscopic electronic properties of condensed matter systems with rather complex properties. Check out the Article.

We investigated the local electronic density of states of a two-dimensional electron gas in the presence of strong compositional disorder using STM and inverse-photo-electron spectroscopy experiments. We find the electronic states to exhibit multifractal scaling characteristics, typical for a disordered system near the quantum-critical metal insulator transition. These findings are consistent with results from realistic Anderson model calculation that consider the microscopic disorder in our sample. We anticipate that our comprehensive method, combining real and momentum-space resolving experiments with detailed model calculations, could also be of value to study other strongly disordered systems such as superconducting high-entropy alloys in the future.