No Arabic abstract
The in-plane resistivity, Hall resistivity and magnetization of graphite were investigated in pulsed magnetic fields applied along the textit{c}-axis. The Hall resistivity approaches zero at around 53 T where the in-plane and out-of-plane resistivities steeply decrease. The differential magnetization also shows an anomaly at around this field with a similar amplitude compared to that of de Haas-van Alphen oscillations at lower fields. This transition field appears insensitive to disorder, but reduces with doping holes. These results suggest the realization of the quantum limit states above 53 T. As a plausible explanation for the observed gapped out-of-plane conduction above 53 T, the emergence of the excitonic BCS-like state in graphite is proposed.
Half a century ago, Mott noted that tuning the carrier density of a semimetal towards zero produces an insulating state in which electrons and holes form bound pairs. It was later argued that such pairing persists even if a semiconducting gap opens in the underlying band structure, giving rise to what has become known as the strong coupling limit of an `excitonic insulator. While these `weak and `strong coupling extremes were subsequently proposed to be manifestations of the same excitonic state of electronic matter, the predicted continuity of such a phase across a band gap opening has not been realized experimentally in any material. Here we show the quantum limit of graphite, by way of temperature and angle-resolved magnetoresistance measurements, to host such an excitonic insulator phase that evolves continuously between the weak and strong coupling limits. We find that the maximum transition temperature T_EI of the excitonic phase is coincident with a band gap opening in the underlying electronic structure at B_0= 46 +/- 1 T, which is evidenced above T_EI by a thermally broadened inflection point in the magnetoresistance. The overall asymmetry of the observed phase boundary around B_0 closely matches theoretical predictions of a magnetic field-tuned excitonic insulator phase in which the opening of a band gap marks a crossover from predominantly momentum-space pairing to real-space pairing.
Magnetotransport measurements performed on several well-characterized highly oriented pyrolitic graphite and single crystalline Kish graphite samples reveal a reentrant metallic behavior in the basal-plane resistance at high magnetic fields, when only the lowest Landau levels are occupied. The results suggest that the quantum Hall effect and Landau-level-quantization-induced superconducting correlations are relevant to understand the metallic-like state(s) in graphite in the quantum limit.
The quantum de Haas van Alphen (dHvA) and Shubnikov de Haas (SdH) oscillations measured in graphite were decomposed by pass-band filtering onto contributions from three different groups of carriers. We develop the two-dimensional phase analysis method which allows to identify these carriers as (i) minority holes having two-dimensional (2D) parabolic massive spectrum, (ii) majority electrons, also massive but with intermediate 2D-3D spectrum, and (iii) majority holes with 2D Dirac-like spectrum which seems to be responsible for the unusual strongly-correlated electronic phenomena in graphite.
We report on the magnetic field (0T$ le B le 9$T) dependence of the longitudinal thermal conductivity $kappa(T,B)$ of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite in the temperature range 5 K $le Tle$ 20 K for fields parallel to the $c-$axis. We show that $kappa(T,B)$ shows large oscillations in the high-field region (B > 2 T) where clear signs of the Quantum-Hall effect are observed in the Hall resistance. With the measured longitudinal electrical resistivity we show that the Wiedemann-Franz law is violated in the high-field regime.
Strong magnetic field induces at least two phase transitions in graphite beyond the quantum limit where many-body effects are expected. We report on a study using a state-of-the-art non-destructive magnet allowing to attain 90.5 T at 1.4 K, which reveals a new field-induced phase and evidence that the insulating state destroyed at 75 T is an excitonic condensate of electron-hole pairs. By monitoring the angle dependence of in-plane and out-of-plane magnetoresistance, we distinguish between the role of cyclotron and Zeeman energies in driving various phase transitions. We find that, with the notable exception of the transition field separating the two insulating states, the threshold magnetic field for all other transitions display an exact cosine angular dependence. Remarkably, the threshold field for the destruction of the second insulator (phase B) is temperature-independent with no detectable Landau-level crossing nearby. We conclude that the field-induced insulator starts as a weak-coupling spin-density-wave, but ends as a strong-coupling excitonic insulator of spin-polarized electron-hole pairs.