Our recent paper on the Discovery of a strain-stabilized smectic electronic order in LiFeAs is an Editors’ highlight in Nature Communications. Our work combines atomic-scale imaging by low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy with uniaxial strain. Straining the iron-based superconductor LiFeAs reveals the emergence of a new modulated phase, representative of a smectic electronic order. Tunneling spectra of the superconducting gap in this phase show a substantially modified superconducting order parameter.
Our results highlight the importance of electron-lattice coupling in the iron-based superconductor LiFeAs.
Read more in our article in Nature Communications.