Pressure-induced Anderson-Mott transition in elemental tellurium
Authors
Fontes, MB
Moutinho, M
Baggio-Saitovitch, E
Silva Neto, MB
Publication Date
2021-12Journal Title
Communications Materials
ISSN
2662-4443
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Volume
2
Issue
1
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Oliveira, J., Fontes, M., Moutinho, M., Rowley, S., Baggio-Saitovitch, E., Silva Neto, M., & Enderlein, C. (2021). Pressure-induced Anderson-Mott transition in elemental tellurium. Communications Materials, 2 (1) https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-020-00110-1
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Elemental tellurium is a small band-gap semiconductor, which is always p-doped due to the natural occurrence of vacancies. Its chiral non-centrosymmetric structure, characterized by helical chains arranged in a triangular lattice, and the presence of a spin-polarized Fermi surface, render tellurium a promising candidate for future applications. Here, we use a theoretical framework, appropriate for describing the corrections to conductivity from quantum interference effects, to show that a high-quality tellurium single crystal undergoes a quantum phase transition at low temperatures from an Anderson insulator to a correlated disordered metal at around 17 kbar. Such insulator-to-metal transition manifests itself in all measured physical quantities and their critical exponents are consistent with a scenario in which a pressure-induced Lifshitz transition shifts the Fermi level below the mobility edge, paving the way for a genuine Anderson-Mott transition. We conclude that previously puzzling quantum oscillation and transport measurements might be explained by a possible Anderson-Mott ground state and the observed phase transition.</jats:p>
Keywords
Article, /639/766/119/2795, /639/301/119/1000, article
Identifiers
s43246-020-00110-1, 110
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-020-00110-1
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/315656
Rights
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Licence URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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