Fig. 3: Tunneling spectroscopy and QPI maps.

a Upper panel, STS spectrum recorded on 1T/2H-TaS₂ at 14 K. Lower panel, QPI map measured in the energy range marked in gray in the upper panel. No signal is detected apart from the Bragg peaks corresponding to the \((\sqrt{13}\times \sqrt{13}){{{\rm{R}}}}13.{9}^{{{{\rm{o}}}}}\) CDW in the 1T layer, marked with blue hollow circles, and the noise lines attributed to the scan direction and propagated by the symmetrization procedure (see Supplementary Sections 2 and 3), indicated in yellow. The absence of a QPI here is expected because at 14K the 1T layer is a Mott insulator and therefore no free electrons are available for scattering. b Upper panel, STS spectrum recorded on 1T/2H-TaS₂ at 1.2 K. The Kondo lattice gap appears at the Fermi level superimposed on the Kondo resonance (see region highlighted in gray). Lower panel, QPI map measured in the energy range marked in gray in the upper panel. Apart from the 1T CDW spots (blue hollow circles) and the noise lines (yellow lines) additional features are clearly resolved. This is expected because after the coherent Kondo lattice formation the Mott electrons are deconfined and form part of the the new Fermi surface of the system. The inset between both QPI maps gives a schematic representation of the atomic reciprocal lattice, where the atomic and 1T CDW spots are shown in black and blue hollow circles, respectively. The black halve hexagon represents the 1T CDW Surface Brillouin zone (SBZ) and the red-blue circle marks the region corresponding to the experimental QPI data shown in the QPI panels.