791 research outputs found
Non-Fermi liquid behavior in nearly charge ordered layered metals
Non-Fermi liquid behavior is shown to occur in two-dimensional metals which
are close to a charge ordering transition driven by the Coulomb repulsion. A
linear temperature dependence of the scattering rate together with an increase
of the electron effective mass occur above T*, a temperature scale much smaller
than the Fermi temperature. It is shown that the anomalous temperature
dependence of the optical conductivity of the quasi-two-dimensional organic
metal alpha-(BEDT-TTF)2MHg(SCN)4, with M=NH4 and Rb, above T*=50-100 K, agrees
qualitatively with our predictions for the electronic properties of nearly
charge ordered two-dimensional metals.Comment: accepted in Phys. Rev. Let
Optical properties of the iron-pnictide analog BaMn2As2
We have investigated the infrared and Raman optical properties of BaMn2As2 in
the ab-plane and along the c-axis. The most prominent features in the infrared
spectra are the Eu and A2u phonon modes which show clear TO-LO splitting from
the energy loss function analysis. All the phonon features we observed in
infrared and Raman spectra are consistent with the calculated values. Compared
to the iron-pnictide analog AFe2As2, this compound is much more two-dimensional
in its electronic properties. For E || c-axis, the overall infrared
reflectivity is insulating like. Within the ab-plane the material exhibits a
semiconducting behavior. An energy gap 2{\Delta}=48 meV can be clearly
identified below room temperature.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure
Mobility gap in intermediate valent TmSe
The infrared optical conductivity of intermediate valence compound TmSe
reveals clear signatures for hybridization of light - and heavy f-electronic
states with m* ~ 1.6 m_0 and m* ~ 16 m_0, respectively. At moderate and high
temperatures, the metal-like character of the heavy carriers dominate the
low-frequency response while at low temperatures (T_N < T < 100 K) a gap-like
feature is observed in the conductivity spectra below 10 meV which is assigned
to be a mobility gap due to localization of electrons on local Kondo singlets,
rather than a hybridization gap in the density of states
Infrared study of valence transition compound YbInCu4 using cleaved surfaces
Optical reflectivity R(w) of YbInCu4 single crystals has been measured across
its first-order valence transition at T_v ~ 42 K, using both polished and
cleaved surfaces. R(w) measured on cleaved surfaces Rc(w) was found much lower
than that on polished surface Rp(w) over the entire infrared region. Upon
cooling through T_v, Rc(w) showed a rapid change over a temperature range of
less than 2 K, and showed only minor changes with further cooling. In contrast,
Rp(w) showed much more gradual and continuous changes across T_v, similarly to
previously reported data on polished surfaces. The present result on cleaved
surfaces demonstrates that the microscopic electronic structures of YbInCu4
observed with infrared spectroscopy indeed undergo a sudden change upon the
valence transition. The gradual temperature-evolution of Rp(w) is most likely
due to the compositional and/or Yb-In site disorders caused by polishing.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, Fig.1(a) correcte
Competition between Charge Ordering and Superconductivity in Layered Organic Conductors -(BEDT-TTF)Hg(SCN) (M = K, NH)
While the optical properties of the superconducting salt
-(BEDT-TTF)NHHg(SCN) remain metallic down to 2 K, in the
non-superconducting K-analog a pseudogap develops at frequencies of about 200
cm for temperatures T < 200 K. Based on exact diagonalisation
calculations on an extended Hubbard model at quarter-filling we argue that
fluctuations associated with short range charge ordering are responsible for
the observed low-frequency feature. The different ground states, including
superconductivity, are a consequence of the proximity of these compounds to a
quantum phase charge-ordering transition driven by the intermolecular Coulomb
repulsion.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Optical probe of carrier doping by X-ray irradiation in organic dimer Mott insulator -(BEDT-TTF)Cu[N(CN)Cl
We investigated the infrared optical spectra of an organic dimer Mott
insulator -(BEDT-TTF)Cu[N(CN)]Cl, which was irradiated with
X-rays. We observed that the irradiation caused a large spectral weight
transfer from the mid-infrared region, where interband transitions in the dimer
and Mott-Hubbard bands take place, to a Drude part in a low-energy region; this
caused the Mott gap to collapse. The increase of the Drude part indicates a
carrier doping into the Mott insulator due to irradiation defects. The strong
redistribution of the spectral weight demonstrates that the organic Mott
insulator is very close to the phase border of the bandwidth-controlled Mott
transition.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Pressure Tuning of an Ionic Insulator into a Heavy Electron Metal: An Infrared Study of YbS
Optical conductivity [] of YbS has been measured under
pressure up to 20 GPa. Below 8 GPa, is low since YbS is an
insulator with an energy gap between fully occupied 4 state and unoccupied
conduction () band. Above 8 GPa, however, increases
dramatically, developing a Drude component due to heavy carriers and
characteristic infrared peaks. It is shown that increasing pressure has caused
an energy overlap and hybridization between the band and 4 state, thus
driving the initially ionic and insulating YbS into a correlated metal with
heavy carriers
Pressure-dependent optical investigations of -(BEDT-TTF)I: tuning charge order and narrow gap towards a Dirac semimetal
Infrared optical investigations of -(BEDT-TTF)I have been
performed in the spectral range from 80 to 8000~cm down to temperatures
as low as 10~K by applying hydrostatic pressure. In the metallic state, ~K, we observe a 50\% increase in the Drude contribution as well as the
mid-infrared band due to the growing intermolecular orbital overlap with
pressure up to 11~kbar. In the ordered state, , we extract how
the electronic charge per molecule varies with temperature and pressure:
Transport and optical studies demonstrate that charge order and metal-insulator
transition coincide and consistently yield a linear decrease of the transition
temperature by ~K/kbar. The charge disproportionation
diminishes by /kbar and the optical gap between
the bands decreases with pressure by -47~cm/kbar. In our high-pressure
and low-temperature experiments, we do observe contributions from the massive
charge carriers as well as from massless Dirac electrons to the low-frequency
optical conductivity, however, without being able to disentangle them
unambiguously.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
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