Universality of the Mott–Ioffe–Regel limit in metals

By N. Hussey, Koshi Takenaka, H. Takagi. 2004

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The absence of resistivity saturation in many strongly correlated metals, including the high-temperature superconductors, is critically examined from the viewpoint of optical conductivity measurements. Coherent quasiparticle conductivity, in the form of a Drude peak centred at zero frequency, is found to disappear as the mean free path (at ω = 0) becomes comparable with the interatomic spacing. This basic loss of coherence at the so-called Mott–Ioffe–Regel (MIR) limit suggests that the universality of the MIR criterion is preserved even in the presence of strong electron correlations. We argue that the shedding of spectral weight at low frequencies, induced by strong correlation effects, is the primary origin of the extended positive slope of the resistivity to high temperatures observed in all so-called ‘bad metals’. Moreover, in common with those metals which exhibit resistivity saturation at high temperatures, the scattering rate itself, as extracted from optical spectra, saturates at a value consistent with the MIR limit. We consider possible implications that this ceiling in the scattering rate may have for our understanding of transport within a wide variety of bad metals and suggest a better method for analysing their optical response.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e8c1e3f8003106ac873e82df72bfe81942944929

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Citations in the corpus

The thermoelectric properties of inhomogeneous holographic lattices (2014, background): “This is reminiscent of the Mott-Ioffe-Regel bound [27, 28] of metals (see figure 2), though here, of course, there are no quasi-particles.”
Interaction-driven localization in holography (2013, background): “These marginal and irrelevant modes must be turned on and their coefficients {u1,vi 1,a1,w1} tuned to match onto the near-boundary behaviour (4) on integrating the equations of motion out to large r .”
Theory of universal incoherent metallic transport (2014, background): “In many materials of interest these thermoelectric terms are expected or measured to be small by powers of kBT/EF compared with the other terms on the right-hand side of (4).”
Thermoelectric DC conductivities from black hole horizons (2014, background): “This is reminiscent of the Mott-IoffeRegel bound [31, 32], but here, of course, we have no quasi-particles.”
Focused electron beam induced deposition meets materials science (2017, methodology): “By metallic we mean materials whose room temperature resistivity is clearly below the critical value set by the Mott-Ioffe-Regel criterion [37].”