Abstract
Elemental tellurium is a small band-gap semiconductor, which is always p-doped due to the natural occurrence of vacancies. Its chiral non-centrosymmetric structure, characterized by helical chains arranged in a triangular lattice, and the presence of a spin-polarized Fermi surface, render tellurium a promising candidate for future applications. Here, we use a theoretical framework, appropriate for describing the corrections to conductivity from quantum interference effects, to show that a high-quality tellurium single crystal undergoes a quantum phase transition at low temperatures from an Anderson insulator to a correlated disordered metal at around 17 kbar. Such insulator-to-metal transition manifests itself in all measured physical quantities and their critical exponents are consistent with a scenario in which a pressure-induced Lifshitz transition shifts the Fermi level below the mobility edge, paving the way for a genuine Anderson-Mott transition. We conclude that previously puzzling quantum oscillation and transport measurements might be explained by a possible Anderson-Mott ground state and the observed phase transition.
Highlights
Elemental tellurium is a small band-gap semiconductor, which is always p-doped due to the natural occurrence of vacancies
The over-all resistivity curves are typical for an extrinsic semiconductor, which is consistent with studies of other high-purity tellurium samples
As the data suggests and the following theory further corroborates, an Anderson–Mott insulator–metal transition (IMT) does occur around the critical pressure associated with the Lifshitz transition, where the Fermi surface changes its topology
Summary
Elemental tellurium is a small band-gap semiconductor, which is always p-doped due to the natural occurrence of vacancies. We use a theoretical framework, appropriate for describing the corrections to conductivity from quantum interference effects, to show that a high-quality tellurium single crystal undergoes a quantum phase transition at low temperatures from an Anderson insulator to a correlated disordered metal at around 17 kbar. In our pressure-dependent study of the electrical transport properties of a high-quality tellurium single crystal, we find that the chemical potential enters the top of the VB when the temperature is lowered to around 1 K, which has been suggested previously[13] This temperature and above a temperature at which the conductivity saturates, the material exhibits variable range hopping (VRH) behavior with the associated characteristic
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