Conductivity noise study of the insulator-metal transition and phase co-existence in epitaxial samarium nickelate thin films

Interaction between the lattice and the orbital degrees of freedom not only makes rare-earth nickelates unusually "bad metal", but also introduces a temperature driven insulator-metal phase transition. Here we investigate this insulator-metal phase transition in thin films of $\mathrm{SmNiO_3}$ using the slow time dependent fluctuations (noise) in resistivity. The normalized magnitude of noise is found to be extremely large, being nearly eight orders of magnitude higher than thin films of common disordered metallic systems, and indicates electrical conduction via classical percolation in a spatially inhomogeneous medium. The higher order statistics of the fluctuations indicate a strong non-Gaussian component of noise close to the transition, attributing the inhomogeneity to co-existence of the metallic and insulating phases. Our experiment offers a new insight on the impact of lattice-orbital coupling on the microscopic mechanism of electron transport in the rare-earth nickelates.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Saturation of Transverse Energy per Charged Hadron and Freeze-Out Criteria in Heavy-Ion Collisions

For beam energies from SPS to RHIC, the transverse energy per charged particle, $E_T/N_{\textrm{ch}}$, saturates at a value of approximately 0.8 GeV. A direct connection between this value and the freeze-out criterium $E/N \approx 1$ GeV for the primordial energy and particle number in the hadronic resonance gas model is established.Comment: 7pages 5 figure