The Physical Review Letters (PRL), a world-class journal in physics, recently published the new idea of the research group led by Professor Xu Hu and Academician Tang Shuxian from the Department of Physics of SUSTech on enabling quasi-one-dimensional Peierls Phase Transition, with the topic of Quasi-One-Dimensional Metal-Insulator Transitions in Compound Semiconductor Surfaces (Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 116101 (2016)).

SUSTech was the first author affiliation and corresponding unit of the paper. In this paper, Dr. Zhao Jinzhu of the Research Group was the first author, and Professor Xu Hu and Academician Tang Shuxian were co-corresponding authors. Meanwhile, there were several co-authors from domestic and foreign colleges and universities and research institutions.

   In 1930s, R. Peierls theoretically predicted the instability of one-dimensional electronic system and the resulting metal-insulator transition, called Peierls Phase Transition by later generations. Over the decades, it was hard to observe this seemingly simple phenomenon in real materials due to many aspects, mainly including the difficulty to build a pure one-dimensional electronic system to shield the interference of two-dimensional and three-dimensional effects. The scientific community has ever made many attempts, but has never got satisfactory results. Calculated based on the first principles, the work puts forward a new idea on enabling quasi-one-dimensional Peierls Phase Transition, namely, to use semi-hydrogenated semiconductor surface to build quasi-one-dimensional electronic system and predict that such system can produce Peierls Phase Transition. The calculations of the work show that the idea not only is applicable to specific materials, but also can achieve expected Peierls Phase Transition on the non-polar surface of common wurtzite semiconductors such as gallium nitride, zinc oxide, aluminum nitride and other materials. The significance of the work is the provision of the possibility to enable quasi-one-dimensional Peierls Phase Transition for the first time, as well as of a new idea to create ideal one-dimensional electronic system, making it possible to observe more low dimensional condensed matter physical behaviors.

In addition, In September 2015, the Research Group led by Xu Hu and Tang Shuxian published a review article titled “Comment on ‘Interplay between Water and TiO2 Anatase (101) Surface with Subsurface Oxygen Vacancy’” (Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 149601 (2015)), with SUSTech as the first author affiliation. In this paper, Dr. Fan Jing was the first author and Xu Hu was the corresponding author.

The effort of the Research Group led by Xu Hu and Tang Shuxian was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Projects.

Contributed by: Department of Physics of SUSTech