Internal field emission nature of the fine structure of tunnel spectra in icosahedral quasicrystals

Calorimetric and tunnel data for the icosahedral phases of the Al-Cu-Fe system have been jointly analyzed. It has been found that the field-dependent part of the tunnel conductance can be represented as the sum of elementary terms similar in nature to thermal Schottky anomalies. As a result, the features of the fine structure of tunnel spectra in the form of zero-bias anomalies, peaks, and humps can be due to the internal field emission and can indicate a wide distribution of two-level electron traps in the electronic structure of quasicrystals. It was previously assumed that these features constitute a direct image of the density of single-electron states of the conduction band.