Temperature dependent resistivity in the doped two dimensional metallic phase of mTMD bilayers

Two recent experiments from Cornell and Columbia have reported insulator-to-metal transitions in two-dimensional (2D) moir\'e transition metal dichalcogenides (mTMD) induced by doping around half-filling, where the system is a Mott insulator. In the current work, we consider the temperature dependent resistivity of this metallic phase in the doped situation away from half-filling, arguing that it arises from the strongly temperature dependent 2D Friedel oscillations (i.e. finite momentum screening) associated with random quenched charged impurities, leading to the observed strongly increasing linear-in-$T$ resistivity in the metallic phase. Our theory appears to account for the temperature-dependent metallic resistivity for doping around half-filling of the effective moir\'e TMD band, showing that temperature-dependent screened Coulomb disorder is an essential ingredient of doped 2D mTMD physics.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Anderson localization crossover in 2D Si systems: The past and the present

Using Ioffe-Regel-Mott (IRM) criterion for strong localization crossover in disordered doped 2D electron systems, we theoretically study the relationships among the three key experimentally determined localization quantities: critical density ($n_\mathrm{c}$), critical resistance ($\rho_\mathrm{c}$), and sample quality defined by the effective impurity density (as experimentally diagnosed by the sample mobility, $\mu_\mathrm{m}$, at densities much higher than critical densities). Our results unify experimental results for 2D metal-insulator transitions (MIT) in Si systems over a 50-year period (1970-2020), showing that $n_\mathrm{c}$ ($\rho_\mathrm{c}$) decrease (increase) with increasing sample quality, explaining why the early experiments in the 1970s, using low-quality samples ($\mu_\mathrm{m} \sim 10^3 \mathrm{cm}^2/Vs$) reported strong localization crossover at $n_c \sim 10^{12} \mathrm{cm}^{-2}$ with $\rho_c \sim 10^3\Omega$ whereas recent experiments (after 1995), using high-quality samples ($\mu_\mathrm{m} >10^4 \mathrm{cm}^2/Vs$), report $n_c \sim 10^{11} \mathrm{cm}^{-2}$ with $\rho_c>10^4\Omega$. Our theory establishes the 2D MIT to be primarily a screened Coulomb disorder-driven strong localization crossover phenomenon, which happens at different sample-dependent critical density and critical resistance, thus unifying Si 2D MIT phenomena over a 50-year period.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Density-tuned effective metal-insulator transitions in 2D semiconductor layers: Anderson localization or Wigner crystallization

Electrons (or holes) confined in 2D semiconductor layers have served as model systems for studying disorder and interaction effects for almost 50 years. In particular, strong disorder drives the metallic 2D carriers into a strongly localized Anderson insulator (AI) at low densities whereas pristine 2D electrons in the presence of no (or little) disorder should solidify into a Wigner crystal at low carrier densities. Since the disorder in 2D semiconductors is mostly Coulomb disorder arising from random charged impurities, the applicable physics is complex as the carriers interact with each other as well as with the random charged impurities through the same long-range Coulomb coupling. By critically theoretically analyzing the experimental transport data in depth using a realistic transport theory to calculate the low-temperature 2D resistivity as a function of carrier density in 11 different experimental samples covering 9 different materials, we establish, utilizing the Ioffe-Regel-Mott criterion for strong localization, a direct connection between the critical localization density for the 2D metal-insulator transition (MIT) and the sample mobility deep into the metallic state, which for clean samples could lead to a localization density low enough to make the transition appear to be a Wigner crystallization. We believe that the insulating phase is always an effective Coulomb disorder-induced localized AI, which may have short-range WC-like correlations at low carrier densities. Our theoretically calculated disorder-driven critical MIT density agrees with experimental findings in all 2D samples, even for the ultra-clean samples. In particular, the extrapolated critical density for the 2D MIT seems to vanish when the high-density mobility goes to infinity, indicating that transport probes a disorder-localized insulating ground state independent of how low the carrier density might be.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Planckian properties of 2D semiconductor systems

We describe and discuss the low-temperature resistivity (and the temperature-dependent inelastic scattering rate) of several different doped 2D semiconductor systems from the perspective of the Planckian hypothesis asserting that $\hbar/\tau =k_\mathrm{B}T$ provides a scattering bound, where $\tau$ is the appropriate relaxation time. The regime of transport considered here is well-below the Bloch-Gruneisen regime so that phonon scattering is negligible. The temperature-dependent part of the resistivity is almost linear-in-$T$ down to arbitrarily low temperatures, with the linearity arising from an interplay between screening and disorder, connected with carrier scattering from impurity-induced Friedel oscillations. The temperature dependence disappears if the Coulomb interaction between electrons is suppressed. The temperature coefficient of the resistivity is enhanced at lower densities, enabling a detailed study of the Planckian behavior both as a function of the materials system and carrier density. Although the precise Planckian bound never holds, we find somewhat surprisingly that the bound seems to apply approximately with the scattering rate never exceeding $k_\mathrm{B} T$ by more than an order of magnitude either in the experiment or in the theory. In addition, we calculate the temperature-dependent electron-electron inelastic scattering rate by obtaining the temperature-dependent self-energy arising from Coulomb interaction, also finding it to obey the Planckian bound within an order of magnitude at all densities and temperatures. We introduce the concept of a generalized Planckian bound where $\hbar/\tau$ is bounded by $\alpha k_\mathrm{B} T$ with $\alpha\sim 10$ or so in the super-Planckian regime with the strict Planckian bound of $\alpha$=1 being a nongeneric finetuned situation.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures. Revised version with new results, figures, and reference

Hydrodynamics, viscous electron fluid, and Wiedeman-Franz law in 2D semiconductors

Considering theoretically the transition between hydrodynamic and ballistic regimes in 2D semiconductors, we show that electrons in high-mobility 2D GaAs are by far the best system for the direct observation of collective hydrodynamic effects even in bulk transport properties independent of complicated transport features in narrow constrictions and small systems where Gurzhi phenomena are typically studied experimentally. We predict a strong hydrodynamics-induced generic violation of the Wiedeman-Franz law in bulk 2D GaAs systems for mobilities as modest as $10^6 \mathrm{cm}^2/Vs$ and densities $1$-$5\times10^{11} \mathrm{cm}^{-2}$ in the temperature range of $T=1$-$40K$.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure