Vanadium sesquioxide V2O3 is considered a textbook example of Mott-Hubbard physics. In this paper we present an extended optical study of its whole temperature/doping phase diagram as obtained by doping the pure material with M=Cr or Ti atoms (V1-xMx
)2O3. We reveal that its thermodynamically stable metallic and insulating phases, although macroscopically equivalent, show very different low-energy electrodynamics. The Cr and Ti doping drastically change both the antiferromagnetic gap and the paramagnetic metallic properties. A slight chromium content induces a mesoscopic electronic phase separation, while the pure compound is characterized by short-lived quasiparticles at high temperature. This study thus provides a new comprehensive scenario of the Mott-Hubbard physics in the prototype compound V2O3.
The optical properties of a V4O7 single crystal have been investigated from the high temperature metallic phase down to the low temperature antiferromagnetic insulating one. The temperature dependent behavior of the optical conductivity across the me
tal-insulator transition (MIT) can be explained in a polaronic scenario. Charge carriers form strongly localized polarons in the insulating phase as suggested by a far-infrared charge gap abruptly opening at T_MIT = 237 K. In the metallic phase instead the presence of a Drude term is indicative of fairly delocalized charges with a moderately renormalized mass m* = 5m_e. The electronic spectral weight is almost recovered on an energy scale of 1 eV, which is much narrower compared to VO2 and V2O3 cases. Those findings suggest that electron-lattice interaction rather than electronic correlation is the driving force for V4O7 metal-insulator transition.
The magnetically driven metal-insulator transition (MIT) was predicted by Slater in the fifties. Here a long-range antiferromagnetic (AF) order can open up a gap at the Brillouin electronic band boundary regardless of the Coulomb repulsion magnitude.
However, while many low-dimensional organic conductors display evidence for an AF driven MIT, in three-dimensional (3D) systems the Slater MIT still remains elusive. We employ terahertz and infrared spectroscopy to investigate the MIT in the NaOsO3 3D antiferromagnet. From the optical conductivity analysis we find evidence for a continuous opening of the energy gap, whose temperature dependence can be well described in terms of a second order phase transition. The comparison between the experimental Drude spectral weight and the one calculated through Local Density Approximation (LDA) shows that electronic correlations play a limited role in the MIT. All the experimental evidence demonstrates that NaOsO3 is the first known 3D Slater insulator.
