Observation of decoupling of electrons from phonon bath close to a correlation driven metal-insulator transition

Abstract

We observed that close to a Mott transition, over a small temperature range, the predominance of slow relaxations leads to decoupling of electrons from the thermal bath. This has been established by observation of large deviation of the thermal noise in the films of Mott system $NdNi{O}_3$ from the canonical Johnson-Nyquist value of $4k_{B}TR$ close to the transition. It is suggested that such a large noise arise from small isolated pockets of nanometric metallic phases (estimated size $\sim$ 15-20 nm) within the insulating phase with the charging energy as the control parameter.

27 pages with Supplementary, In revised version discussion updated, New references