Elizabeth Norman

The Mott insulating state is the progenitor of many interesting quantum phases of matter including the famous high-temperature superconductors and quantum spin liquids. A recent candidate for novel spin liquid phenomena is $\alpha \text{−}{\mathrm{RuCl}}_3$, a layered honeycomb Mott insulator whose electronic structure has been a source of mystery. In particular, scanning tunneling spectroscopy has indicated a Mott gap in $\alpha \text{−}{\mathrm{RuCl}}_3$ that is much lower than the 2-eV value observed in photoemission measurements. Here, we show that the origin of this discrepancy is a spreading resistance artifact associated with tunneling into highly resistive materials by comparing with prior experiments and numerical modeling. A similar phenomenon is also observed in a substitutional alloy, ${\mathrm{Ir}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{Ru}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{Cl}}_3$, that has a higher resistivity than the parent compound. While the tunneling measurements cannot be used to accurately measure the sample density of states for these materials, we can take advantage of the spreading resistance sensitivity to quantify the anisotropic resistivity of these layered materials and connect to previous macroscopic transport observations.