Hot electron effects and electric field scaling near the metal-insulator transition in multilayer MoS2

Abstract

The layered transition metal dichalcogenides have emerged as valuable platforms to study the challenging problem of metal-insulator transition in two dimensions. It was demonstrated that multilayer $\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ exhibits clearly distinctive metallic and insulating behaviors in conductivity in response to both temperature and the electric field. Here, we report on the scaling analyses of conductivity for the electric field in addition to the temperature, which is performed with the consideration of electron-electron interactions for multilayer $\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$. Based on the analysis of hot electron effects in the electric field, we find that scaling for the electric field is relevant for the metallic phase in the high-field regime, enabling one to extract the dynamical critical exponent $z$ close to 1. This result supports that the metal-insulator transition in multilayer $\mathrm{Mo}{\mathrm{S}}_{2}$ is a true quantum critical phenomenon, in which strong interactions induce the transition.