Conductivity of two-dimensional small gap semiconductors and topological insulators in strong Coulomb disorder

Abstract

We are honored to dedicate this article to Emmanuel Rashba on the occasion of his 95 birthday. In the ideal disorder-free situation, a two-dimensional band gap insulator has an activation energy for conductivity equal to half the band gap, $\Delta$. But transport experiments usually exhibit a much smaller activation energy at low temperature, and the relation between this activation energy and $\Delta$ is unclear. Here we consider the temperature-dependent conductivity of a two-dimensional narrow gap semiconductor on a substrate containing Coulomb impurities, mostly focusing on the case when amplitude of the random potential $\Gamma \gg \Delta$. We show that the conductivity generically exhibits three regimes and only the highest temperature regime exhibits an activation energy that reflects the band gap. At lower temperatures, the conduction proceeds through nearest-neighbor or variable-range hopping between electron and hole puddles created by the disorder. We show that the activation energy and characteristic temperature associated with these processes steeply collapse near a critical impurity concentration. Larger concentrations lead to an exponentially small activation energy and exponentially long localization length, which in mesoscopic samples can appear as a disorder-induced insulator-to-metal transition. We arrive at a similar disorder driven steep insulator-metal transition in thin films of three-dimensional topological insulators with very large dielectric constant, where due to confinement of electric field internal Coulomb impurities create larger disorder potential. Away from neutrality point this unconventional insulator-to-metal transition is augmented by conventional metal-insulator transition at small impurity concentrations, so that we arrive at disorder-driven re-entrant metal-insulator-metal transition.

16 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2111.09466

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• Disordered 2D ferromagnetism at the surface of FeSi
• Direct topological insulator transitions in three dimensions are destabilized by non-perturbative effects of disorder
• Electronic transport mechanisms in a thin crystal of the Kitaev candidate $\alpha$-RuCl${}_3$ probed through guarded high impedance measurements
• Bound state-continuum resonance transition in a shallow quantum well
• Impact of static disorder on quasiparticle spectra: Debye-Waller, mean free path and potential fluctuation effects