Topological phase transition in quasi-one dimensional organic conductors

High-throughput design of Peierls and charge density wave phases in Q1D organometallic materials

Soft-phonon modes of an undistorted phase encode a material's preference for symmetry lowering. However, the evidence is sparse for the relationship between an unstable phonon wavevector's reciprocal and the number of formula units in the stable distorted phase. This "1/q^*-criterion" holds great potential for the first-principles design of materials, especially in low-dimension. We validate the approach on the Q1D organometallic materials space containing 1199 ring-metal units and identify candidates that are stable in undistorted (1 unit), Peierls (2 units), charge density wave (3-5 units), or long wave (>5 units) phases. We highlight materials exhibiting gap-opening as well as an uncommon gap-closing Peierls transition and discuss an example case stabilized as a charge density wave insulator. We present the data generated for this study through an interactive publicly accessible Big Data analytics platform (https://moldis.tifrh.res.in/data/rmq1d) facilitating limitless and seamless data-mining explorations.

Bloch Oscillations in Fibonacci lattices: polaron formation

We investigated the dynamics of an electron subjected to a uniform electric field in the scope of a tight-binding electron-phonon interacting approach. We aimed at describing the transport in a one-dimensional lattice in which the on-site energies are distributed according to a Fibonacci sequence. Within this physical picture, we obtained a novel dynamical process with no counterpart in ordered lattices. Our findings showed that in low-disorder limit, the electron performs spatial Bloch oscillations, generating, in the turning points of its trajectory, composite quasi-particles-namely, polarons. When it comes to highly disordered systems, two strongly localized polarons are formed in the region where the oscillating charge is confined, thus propagating excitations that are present in the lattice.