Disorder induced 2D metal-insulator transition in moiré transition metal dichalcogenide multilayers

Abstract

We develop a minimal theory for the recently observed metal-insulator transition (MIT) in two-dimensional (2D) moiré multilayer transition metal dichalcogenides (mTMD) using Coulomb disorder in the environment as the underlying mechanism. In particular, carrier scattering by random charged impurities leads to an effective 2D MIT approximately controlled by the Ioffe-Regel criterion, which is qualitatively consistent with the experiments. We find the necessary disorder to be around $5$-$10\times 10^{10}$cm${}^{-2}$ random charged impurities in order to quantitatively explain much, but not all, of the observed MIT phenomenology as reported by two different experimental groups. Our estimate is consistent with the known disorder content in TMDs.

6 pages, 3 figures + supplementary material (2 pages)

References in corpus (4)

• Theory of a continuous Mott transition in two dimensions
• The Observation of Percolation-Induced 2D Metal-Insulator Transition in a Si MOSFET
• Transport and percolation in a low-density high-mobility two-dimensional hole system
• An apparent metal insulator transition in high mobility 2D InAs heterostructures

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Topological Phases in AB-Stacked MoTe${}_2$/WSe${}_2$: ${\mathbb{Z}}_2$ Topological Insulators, Chern Insulators, and Topological Charge Density Waves
• Magnetism and Quantum Melting in Moiré-Material Wigner Crystals
• Metal-insulator transition in transition metal dichalcogenide heterobilayer: accurate treatment of interaction
• Electronic transport, metal-insulator transition, and Wigner crystallization in transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers
• Density-tuned effective metal-insulator transitions in 2D semiconductor layers: Anderson localization or Wigner crystallization
• Doping a Mott insulator with excitons in moiré bilayer: fractional superfluid, neutral Fermi surface and Mott transition
• Continuous Mott transition in moiré semiconductors: role of long-wavelength inhomogeneities
• Evidence of the Coulomb gap in the density of states of MoS${}_2$
• Acoustic phonon contribution to the resistivity of twisted bilayer graphene
• Phonon-limited resistivity of multilayer graphene systems
• Pomeranchuk Effect and Tunable Quantum Phase Transitions in 3L-MoTe2/WSe2
• Apparent Kondo effect in Moiré TMD bilayers: Heavy fermions or disorder?
• Continuous Wigner-Mott transition at $\nu =1/5$
• The kinetic theory of ultra-subsonic fermion systems and applications to flat band magic angle twisted bilayer graphene
• Temperature dependent resistivity in the doped two dimensional metallic phase of mTMD bilayers