Determination of the Local Effect of Impurities on the Charge-Density-Wave Phase in TaS2by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Scanning tunneling microscopy has been used to investigate the effects of titanium impurities on the charge-density-wave (CDW) phase in $1T\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{Ta}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$. The average CDW wavelength has been directly measured and found to increase with increasing titanium concentration. However, the local CDW structure distorts significantly in response to the random lattice potential associated with the distorted titanium sites.