Non-saturating magnetoresistance of inhomogeneous conductors: comparison of experiment and simulation

Abstract

The silver chalcogenides provide a striking example of the benefits of imperfection. Nanothreads of excess silver cause distortions in the current flow that yield a linear and non-saturating transverse magnetoresistance (MR). Associated with the large and positive MR is a negative longitudinal MR. The longitudinal MR only occurs in the three-dimensional limit and thereby permits the determination of a characteristic length scale set by the spatial inhomogeneity. We find that this fundamental inhomogeneity length can be as large as ten microns. Systematic measurements of the diagonal and off-diagonal components of the resistivity tensor in various sample geometries show clear evidence of the distorted current paths posited in theoretical simulations. We use a random resistor network model to fit the linear MR, and expand it from two to three dimensions to depict current distortions in the third (thickness) dimension. When compared directly to experiments on Ag${}_{2\pm \delta }$Se and Ag${}_{2\pm \delta }$Te, in magnetic fields up to 55 T, the model identifies conductivity fluctuations due to macroscopic inhomogeneities as the underlying physical mechanism. It also accounts reasonably quantitatively for the various components of the resistivity tensor observed in the experiments.

arXiv comment10 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Non-saturating magnetoresistance in heavily disordered semiconductors
• Classical magnetotransport of inhomogeneous conductors
• Model for a Macroscopically Disordered Conductor with an Exactly Linear High-Field Magnetoresistance
• High field magnetotransport in composite conductors: the effective medium approximation revisited
• Classical Hall transition and magnetoresistance in strongly inhomogeneous planar systems

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