Metallicity without quasi-particles in room-temperature strontium titanate

Abstract

Cooling oxygen-deficient strontium titanate to liquid-helium temperature leads to a decrease in its electrical resistivity by several orders of magnitude. The temperature dependence of resistivity follows a rough T${}^3$ behavior before becoming T${}^2$ in the low-temperature limit, as expected in a Fermi liquid. Here, we show that the roughly cubic resistivity above 100K corresponds to a regime where the quasi-particle mean-free-path is shorter than the electron wave-length and the interatomic distance. These criteria define the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit. Exceeding this limit is the hallmark of strange metallicity, which occurs in strontium titanate well below room temperature, in contrast to other perovskytes. We argue that the T${}^3$-resistivity cannot be accounted for by electron-phonon scattering à la Bloch-Gruneisen and consider an alternative scheme based on Landauer transmission between individual dopants hosting large polarons. We find a scaling relationship between the carrier mobility, the electric permittivity and the frequency of transverse optical soft mode in this temperature range. Providing an account of this observation emerges as a challenge to theory.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Controlling electron-phonon interactions in graphene at ultra high carrier densities
• Theory of universal incoherent metallic transport
• Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in YBa_2Cu_4O_8
• Electron-phonon interaction and charge carrier mass enhancement in SrTiO3
• Fermi surface of the most dilute superconductor
• Intrinsic Mobility Limiting Mechanisms in Lanthanum-doped Strontium Titanate
• First-principles study of the mobility of SrTiO${}_3$
• Conditions for $T^2$ resistivity from electron-electron scattering

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