Oxygen-centred planar orbitals in the electronic structure and spin-density-wave reconstruction of multilayer nickelates
摘要
The recent discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in multilayer nickelates has raised fundamental questions about its electronic origins and possible connection to the cuprates. Here we identify a common electronic phenomenology across multilayer nickelates, including signatures of a doping-dependent incommensurate spin-density-wave instability coherent enough to reconstruct and partially gap the Fermi surface. We achieve this by exploiting the natural polymorphism between bilayer and alternating monolayer–trilayer stacking sequences in bulk La3Ni2O7 crystals and by combining angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) with effective tight-binding modelling. Polarization-dependent ARPES reveals that the first electron-removal states are dominated by oxygen-centred planar orbitals and that doping—and thus the occupation of these orbitals—controls the Fermi-surface topology and the competition between magnetic and superconducting instabilities. Our results establish a direct correspondence between the low-energy electronic structure of layered nickelates and cuprates and point to a common microscopic origin of their unconventional superconductivity, despite the multi-orbital character of the nickelates.