We fabricate artificial molecules composed of heavy atom lead on a van der Waals crystal. Pb atoms templated on a honeycomb charge-order superstructure of IrTe2 form clusters ranging from dimers to heptamers including benzene-shaped ring hexamers. Tunneling spectroscopy and electronic structure calculations reveal the formation of unusual relativistic molecular orbitals within the clusters. The spin-orbit coupling is essential both in forming such Dirac electronic states and stabilizing the artificial molecules by reducing the adatom-substrate interaction. Lead atoms are found to be ideally suited for a maximized relativistic effect. This work initiates the use of novel two dimensional orderings to guide the fabrication of artificial molecules of unprecedented properties.
@article{arxiv.2002.00603,
title = {Artificial Relativistic Molecules},
author = {Jae Whan Park and Hyo Sung Kim and Thomas Brumme and Thomas Heine and Han Woong Yeom},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.00603},
year = {2020}
}