Disordered hyperuniformity in two-dimensional amorphous silica

Yu Zheng; Lei Liu; Hanqing Nan; Zhen-Xiong Shen; Ge Zhang; Duyu Chen; Lixin He; Wenxiang Xu; Mohan Chen; Yang Jiao; Houlong Zhuang

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba0826

Disordered hyperuniformity in two-dimensional amorphous silica

Sci Adv. 2020 Apr 17;6(16):eaba0826. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0826. eCollection 2020 Apr.

Authors

Yu Zheng¹, Lei Liu², Hanqing Nan², Zhen-Xiong Shen^{3

4}, Ge Zhang⁵, Duyu Chen⁶, Lixin He^{3

4}, Wenxiang Xu^{2

7}, Mohan Chen⁸, Yang Jiao^{1

2}, Houlong Zhuang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Arizona State University,Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
² School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA.
³ Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P.R. China.
⁴ Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, P.R. China.
⁵ Department of Physics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
⁶ Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
⁷ College of Mechanics and Materials, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, P.R. China.
⁸ CAPT, HEDPS, College of Engineering, Peking University 100871, P.R. China.

Abstract

Disordered hyperuniformity (DHU) is a recently proposed new state of matter, which has been observed in a variety of classical and quantum many-body systems. DHU systems are characterized by vanishing infinite-wavelength normalized density fluctuations and are endowed with unique novel physical properties. Here, we report the discovery of disordered hyperuniformity in atomic-scale two-dimensional materials, i.e., amorphous silica composed of a single layer of atoms, based on spectral-density analysis of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy images. Moreover, we show via large-scale density functional theory calculations that DHU leads to almost complete closure of the electronic bandgap compared to the crystalline counterpart, making the material effectively a metal. This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom that disorder generally diminishes electronic transport and is due to the unique electron wave localization induced by the topological defects in the DHU state.

Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).