No Arabic abstract
We report infrared studies of the insulator-to-metal transition (IMT) in GaAs doped with either magnetic (Mn) or non-magnetic acceptors (Be). We observe a resonance with a natural assignment to impurity states in the insulating regime of Ga$_{1-x}$Mn$_x$As, which persists across the IMT to the highest doping (16%). Beyond the IMT boundary, behavior combining insulating and metallic trends also persists to the highest Mn doping. Be doped samples however, display conventional metallicity just above the critical IMT concentration, with features indicative of transport within the host valence band.
We observe an insulator-to-metal (I-M) transition in crystalline silicon doped with sulfur to non- equilibrium concentrations using ion implantation followed by pulsed laser melting and rapid resolidification. This I-M transition is due to a dopant known to produce only deep levels at equilibrium concentrations. Temperature-dependent conductivity and Hall effect measurements for temperatures T > 1.7 K both indicate that a transition from insulating to metallic conduction occurs at a sulfur concentration between 1.8 and 4.3 x 10^20 cm-3. Conduction in insulating samples is consistent with variable range hopping with a Coulomb gap. The capacity for deep states to effect metallic conduction by delocalization is the only known route to bulk intermediate band photovoltaics in silicon.
Hyperdoping has emerged as a promising method for designing semiconductors with unique optical and electronic properties, although such properties currently lack a clear microscopic explanation. Combining computational and experimental evidence, we probe the origin of sub-band gap optical absorption and metallicity in Se-hyperdoped Si. We show that sub-band gap absorption arises from direct defect-to-conduction band transitions rather than free carrier absorption. Density functional theory predicts the Se-induced insulator-to-metal transition arises from merging of defect and conduction bands, at a concentration in excellent agreement with experiment. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations confirm the critical concentration, demonstrate that correlation is important to describing the transition accurately, and suggest that it is a classic impurity-driven Mott transition.
Hyperdoping Si with chalcogens is a topic of great interest due to the strong sub-bandgap absorption exhibited by the resulting material, which can be exploited to develop broadband room-temperature infrared photodetectors using fully Si-compatible technology. Here, we report on the critical behavior of the impurity-driven insulator-to-metal transition in Te-hyperdoped Si layers fabricated via ion implantation followed by nanosecond pulsed-laser melting. Electrical transport measurements reveal an insulator-to-metal transition, which is also confirmed and understood by density functional theory calculations. We demonstrate that the metallic phase is governed by a power law dependence of the conductivity at temperatures below 25 K, whereas the conductivity in the insulating phase is well described by a variable-range hopping mechanism with a Coulomb gap at temperatures in the range of 2-50 K. These results show that the electron wave-function in the vicinity of the transition is strongly affected by the disorder and the electron-electron interaction.
Vanadium dioxide (VO$_2$) undergoes a metal-insulator transition (MIT) at 340 K with the structural change between tetragonal and monoclinic crystals as the temperature is lowered. The conductivity $sigma$ drops at MIT by four orders of magnitude. The low-temperature monoclinic phase is known to have a lower ground-state energy. The existence of a $k$-vector ${boldsymbol k}$ is prerequisite for the conduction since the ${boldsymbol k}$ appears in the semiclassical equation of motion for the conduction electron (wave packet). Each wave packet is, by assumption, composed of the plane waves proceeding in the ${boldsymbol k}$ direction perpendicular to the plane. The tetragonal (VO$_2$)$_3$ unit cells are periodic along the crystals $x$-, $y$-, and z-axes, and hence there are three-dimensional $k$-vectors. The periodicity using the non-orthogonal bases does not legitimize the electron dynamics in solids. There are one-dimensional ${boldsymbol k}$ along the c-axis for a monoclinic crystal. We believe this decrease in the dimensionality of the $k$-vectors is the cause of the conductivity drop. Triclinic and trigonal (rhombohedral) crystals have no $k$-vectors, and hence they must be insulators. The majority carriers in graphite are electrons, which is shown by using an orthogonal unit cell for the hexagonal lattice.
We report the suppression of the magnetic phase transition in La1-xCaxMnO3 close to the localized-to-itinerant electronic transition, i.e. at x = 0.2 and x = 0.5. A new crossover temperature Tf can be defined for these compositions instead of TC. Unlike in common continuous magnetic phase transition the susceptibility does not diverge at Tf and a spontaneous magnetization cannot be defined below it. We propose that the proximity to the doping-induced metal-insulator transition introduces a random field which breaks up the electronic/magnetic homogeneity of the system and explains these effects.