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  • Devil's staircase transitio...
    Kuroda, Kenta; Arai, Y; Rezaei, N; Kunisada, S; Sakuragi, S; Alaei, M; Kinoshita, Y; Bareille, C; Noguchi, R; Nakayama, M; Akebi, S; Sakano, M; Kawaguchi, K; Arita, M; Ideta, S; Tanaka, K; Kitazawa, H; Okazaki, K; Tokunaga, M; Haga, Y; Shin, S; Suzuki, H S; Arita, R; Kondo, Takeshi

    Nature communications, 06/2020, Volume: 11, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    Solids with competing interactions often undergo complex phase transitions with a variety of long-periodic modulations. Among such transition, devil's staircase is the most complex phenomenon, and for it, CeSb is the most famous material, where a number of the distinct phases with long-periodic magnetostructures sequentially appear below the Néel temperature. An evolution of the low-energy electronic structure going through the devil's staircase is of special interest, which has, however, been elusive so far despite 40 years of intense research. Here, we use bulk-sensitive angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and reveal the devil's staircase transition of the electronic structures. The magnetic reconstruction dramatically alters the band dispersions at each transition. Moreover, we find that the well-defined band picture largely collapses around the Fermi energy under the long-periodic modulation of the transitional phase, while it recovers at the transition into the lowest-temperature ground state. Our data provide the first direct evidence for a significant reorganization of the electronic structures and spectral functions occurring during the devil's staircase.