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This content will become publicly available on August 13, 2025

Title: Real-space visualization of a defect-mediated charge density wave transition

We study the coupled charge density wave (CDW) and insulator-to-metal transitions in the 2D quantum material 1T-TaS2. By applying in situ cryogenic 4D scanning transmission electron microscopy with in situ electrical resistance measurements, we directly visualize the CDW transition and establish that the transition is mediated by basal dislocations (stacking solitons). We find that dislocations can both nucleate and pin the transition and locally alter the transition temperatureTcby nearly ~75 K. This finding was enabled by the application of unsupervised machine learning to cluster five-dimensional, terabyte scale datasets, which demonstrate a one-to-one correlation between resistance—a global property—and local CDW domain-dislocation dynamics, thereby linking the material microstructure to device properties. This work represents a major step toward defect-engineering of quantum materials, which will become increasingly important as we aim to utilize such materials in real devices.

 
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Award ID(s):
1719875
PAR ID:
10548782
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
PNAS
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume:
121
Issue:
33
ISSN:
0027-8424
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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