Nonintrinsic origin of the magnetic-field-induced metal-insulator and electronic phase transitions in graphite

Abstract

A detailed magnetoresistance study of bulk and microflake samples of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite with a thickness of 25 $\mu$m to 23~nm reveals that the usually observed field-induced metal-insulator and electronic phase transitions vanish in thinner samples. The observed suppression is accompanied by orders of magnitude decrease of the magnetoresistance and of the amplitude of the Shubnikov-de-Haas oscillations. The overall behavior is related to the decrease in the quantity of two-dimensional interfaces between crystalline regions of the same and different stacking orders present in graphite samples. Our results indicate that these field-induced transitions are not intrinsic to the ideal graphite structure and, therefore, a relevant portion of the published interpretations should be reconsidered.

12 pages, 15 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Evidence of Josephson-coupled superconducting regions at the interfaces of Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite
• Identification of a possible superconducting transition above room temperature in natural graphite crystals
• Linear magnetoresistance in a quasi-free two dimensional electron gas in an ultra-high mobility GaAs quantum well
• Intrinsic Superconductivity at 25 K in Highly Oriented Pyrolytic Graphite
• Possible Excitonic Phase of Graphite in the Quantum Limit State
• Evidence for room temperature superconductivity at graphite interfaces
• Granular superconductivity below 5~K in SPI-II pyrolytic graphite

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Enhanced optical conductivity and many-body effects in strongly-driven photo-excited semi-metallic graphite
• Extremely large magnetoresistance in the hourglass Dirac loop chain metal β-ReO${}_2$
• Influence of surface band bending on a narrow band gap semiconductor: Tunneling atomic force studies of graphite with Bernal and rhombohedral stacking orders
• The inadequacy of the $\rho$-T curve for phase transitions in the presence of magnetic fields
• Record-Breaking Magnetoresistance at the Edge of a Microflake of Natural Graphite
• Vector pulse magnet