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Phonon-Mediated Quasiparticle Lifetime Renormalizations in Few-Layer Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Abstract

Understanding the collective behavior of the quasiparticles in solid-state systems underpins the field of non-volatile electronics, including the opportunity to control many-body effects for well-desired physical phenomena and their applications. Hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) is a wide energy bandgap semiconductor, showing immense potential as a platform for low-dimensional device heterostructures. It is an inert dielectric used for gated devices, having a negligible orbital hybridization when placed in contact with other systems. Despite its inertness, we discover a large electron mass enhancement in few-layer hBN affecting the lifetime of the pi-band states. We show that the renormalization is phonon-mediated and consistent with both single- and multiple-phonon scattering events. Our findings thus unveil a so-far unknown many-body state in a wide-bandgap insulator, having important implications for devices using hBN as one of their building blocks.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

  • Håkon Røst
  • Simon Phillip Cooil
  • Anna Cecilie Åsland
  • Jinbang Hu
  • Ayaz Ali
  • Takashi Taniguchi
  • Kenji Watanabe
  • Branson Delano Belle
  • Bodil Holst
  • Jerzy Sadowski
  • Federico Mazzola
  • Justin William Wells

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Smart Sensors and Microsystems
  • University of Venice Ca' Foscari
  • National Research Council
  • University of Bergen
  • University of Oslo
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • National Institute for Materials Science
  • University of Sindh
  • Brookhaven National Laboratory

Year

2023

Published in

Nano Letters

ISSN

1530-6984

Volume

23

Issue

16

Page(s)

7539 - 7545

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository