Photoemission as a probe of coexisting and conflicting periodicities in low-dimensional solids

When two different periodic potentials are present at the same time in a solid, the electron wavefunctions must conform to the resulting overall periodicity. It is the case of the broken-symmetry phases which are often observed in low-dimensional systems. The rearrangement of the electronic states has some interesting and perhaps unexpected consequences on the momentum distribution of the spectral weight, which can be measured in an ARPES experiment.