Abstract
We have studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) the two charge-density wave (CDW) transitions in NbSe3 on in situ cleaved (b,c) plane. We could identify the three types of chains existing inside a single unit cell as well as characterize how both CDWs are distributed on these elementary chains. We also followed between 5 and 140K the temperature dependence of first-order CDW satellite spots, obtained from the Fourier transform of the STM images, to extract the surface critical temperatures (Ts). Whereas the high-temperature CDW appears to have comparable critical temperature to the bulk one, the low-T CDW transition occurs at T2s=70–75K, more than 15K above the bulk T2b=59K while at exactly the same wave number. A reasonable mechanism for such an unusually high surface enhancement is a softening of transverse phonon modes involved in the CDW formation.
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