Lithium Intercalation into the Excitonic Insulator Candidate TaNiSe.

A new reduced phase derived from the excitonic insulator candidate TaNiSe has been synthesized via the intercalation of lithium. LiTaNiSe crystallizes in the orthorhombic space group (no. 62) with lattice parameters = 3.50247(3) Å, = 13.4053(4) Å, = 15.7396(2) Å, and 4, with an increase of the unit cell volume by 5.44(1)% compared with TaNiSe. Significant rearrangement of the Ta-Ni-Se layers is observed, in particular a very significant relative displacement of the layers compared to the parent phase, similar to that which occurs under hydrostatic pressure. Neutron powder diffraction experiments and computational analysis confirm that Li occupies a distorted triangular prismatic site formed by Se atoms of adjacent TaNiSe layers with an average Li-Se bond length of 2.724(2) Å. Li-NMR experiments show a single Li environment at ambient temperature. Intercalation suppresses the distortion to monoclinic symmetry that occurs in TaNiSe at 328 K and that is believed to be driven by the formation of an excitonic insulating state. Magnetometry data show that the reduced phase has a smaller net diamagnetic susceptibility than TaNiSe due to the enhancement of the temperature-independent Pauli paramagnetism caused by the increased density of states at the Fermi level evident also from the calculations, consistent with the injection of electrons during intercalation and formation of a metallic phase.