Fermi surface and pseudogap in highly doped Sr$_{2}$IrO$_{4}$

Abstract

The fate of the Fermi surface in bulk electron-doped Sr$_{2}$IrO$_{4}$ remains elusive, as does the origin and extension of its pseudogap phase. Here, we use high-resolution angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) to investigate the electronic structure of Sr$_{2-x}$La$_{x}$IrO$_{4}$ up to $x=0.2$, a factor of two higher than in previous work. We find that the antinodal pseudogap persists up to the highest doping level, and thus beyond the sharp increase in Hall carrier density to $\simeq 1+x$ recently observed above $x^{*}\simeq 0.16$ [Y.-T. Hsu et al., Nature Physics 20, 1593 (2024)]. This suggests that doped iridates host a unique phase of matter in which a large Hall density coexists with an anisotropic pseudogap, breaking up the Fermi surface into disconnected arcs. The temperature boundary of the pseudogap is $T^{*}\simeq 200$ K for $x=0.2$, comparable to cuprates and to the energy scale of short range antiferromagnetic correlations in cuprates and iridates.