Tuning Dirac nodes with correlated d-electrons in BaNiS2

Date: 

May, 2019

Authors: 

N. Nilforoushan, M. Casula, A. Amaricci, M. Caputo, J. Caillaux, L. Khalil, E. Papalazarou, P. Simon, L. Perfetti, I. Vobornik, P. K. Das, J. Fujii, D. Santos-Cottin, Y. Klein, M. Fabrizio, A. Gauzzi, M. Marsi

The unique properties of massless Dirac fermions lead to many remarkable phenomena, and a major challenge towards their technological exploitation is the development of materials with tunable Dirac states. Here we show that this goal may be achieved by using electron-electron correlations in the quasi 2D system BaNiS2. By means of ARPES and first-principles calculations, we unveil the formation of Dirac states by the hybridization of correlated d-electrons with ligand orbitals, which provides an effective band crossing in the presence of a nonsymmorphic symmetry. We show that this mechanism forms Dirac cones extending over a wide energy window around the Fermi level, and that node location in k-space can vary along the Gamma - M symmetry line, instead of being pinned at symmetry points as commonly found in graphene and other Dirac materials. These unique characteristics make BaNiS2 an ideal playground to explore electronic correlation effects in Dirac materials