No Arabic abstract
Heavily oxygen deficient NdNiO$_3$ (NNO) films, which are insulating due to electron localization, contain pristine regions that undergo a hidden metal-insulator transition. Increasing oxygen content increases the connectivity of the metallic regions and the metal-insulator transition is first revealed, upon reaching the percolation threshold, by the presence of hysteresis. Only upon further oxygenation is the global metallic state (with a change in the resistivity slope) eventually achieved. It is shown that sufficient oxygenation leads to linear temperature dependence of resistivity in the metallic state, with a scattering rate directly proportional to temperature. Despite the known difficulties to establish the proportionality constant, the experiments are consistent with a relationship 1/$tau$= $alpha k_B T/hbar$, with $alpha$ not far from unity. These results could provide experimental support for recent theoretical predictions of disorder in a two-fluid model as a possible origin of Planckian dissipation.
The control of materials properties with light is a promising approach towards the realization of faster and smaller electronic devices. With phases that can be controlled via strain, pressure, chemical composition or dimensionality, nickelates are good candidates for the development of a new generation of high performance and low consumption devices. Here we analyze the photoinduced dynamics in a single crystalline NdNiO$_3$ film upon excitation across the electronic gap. Using time-resolved reflectivity and resonant x-ray diffraction, we show that the pump pulse induces an insulator-to-metal transition, accompanied by the melting of the charge order. Finally we compare our results to similar studies in manganites and show that the same model can be used to describe the dynamics in nickelates, hinting towards a unified description of these photoinduced phase transitions.
We review the appearance of the Planckian time $tau_text{Pl} = hbar/(k_B T)$ in both conventional and unconventional metals. We give a pedagogical discussion of the various different timescales (quasiparticle, transport, many-body) that characterize metals, emphasizing conditions under which these times are the same or different. Throughout, we have attempted to clear up aspects of the problem that had been confusing us, in the hope that this helps the reader as well. We discuss the possibility of a Planckian bound on dissipation from both a quasiparticle and a many-body perspective. Planckian quasiparticles can arise naturally from a combination of inelastic scattering and mass renormalization. Many-body dynamics, on the other hand, is constrained by the basic time- and length- scales of local thermalization.
Experimental evidence for the possible universality classes of the metal-insulator transition (MIT) in two dimensions (2D) is discussed. Sufficiently strong disorder, in particular, changes the nature of the transition. Comprehensive studies of the charge dynamics are also reviewed, describing evidence that the MIT in a 2D electron system in silicon should be viewed as the melting of the Coulomb glass. Comparisons are made to recent results on novel 2D materials and quasi-2D strongly correlated systems, such as cuprates.
A correlated material in the vicinity of an insulator-metal transition (IMT) exhibits rich phenomenology and variety of interesting phases. A common avenue to induce IMTs in Mott insulators is doping, which inevitably leads to disorder. While disorder is well known to create electronic inhomogeneity, recent theoretical studies have indicated that it may play an unexpected and much more profound role in controlling the properties of Mott systems. Theory predicts that disorder might play a role in driving a Mott insulator across an IMT, with the emergent metallic state hosting a power law suppression of the density of states (with exponent close to 1; V-shaped gap) centered at the Fermi energy. Such V-shaped gaps have been observed in Mott systems but their origins are as yet unknown. To investigate this, we use scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy to study isovalent Ru substitutions in Sr$_3$(Ir$_{1-x}$Ru$_x$)$_2$O$_7$ which drives the system into an antiferromagnetic, metallic state. Our experiments reveal that many core features of the IMT such as power law density of states, pinning of the Fermi energy with increasing disorder, and persistence of antiferromagnetism can be understood as universal features of a disordered Mott system near an IMT and suggest that V-shaped gaps may be an inevitable consequence of disorder in doped Mott insulators.
Metal to insulator transitions (MITs) driven by strong electronic correlations are common in condensed matter systems, and are associated with some of the most remarkable collective phenomena in solids, including superconductivity and magnetism. Tuning and control of the transition holds the promise of novel, low power, ultrafast electronics, but the relative roles of doping, chemistry, elastic strain and other applied fields has made systematic understanding difficult to obtain. Here we point out that existing data on tuning of the MIT in perovskite transition metal oxides through ionic size effects provides evidence of systematic and large effects on the phase transition due to dynamical fluctuations of the elastic strain, which have been usually neglected. This is illustrated by a simple yet quantitative statistical mechanical calculation in a model that incorporates cooperative lattice distortions coupled to the electronic degrees of freedom. We reproduce the observed dependence of the transition temperature on cation radius in the well-studied manganite and nickelate materials. Since the elastic couplings are generically quite strong, these conclusions will broadly generalize to all MITs that couple to a change in lattice symmetry.