Continuous Mott transition in moiré semiconductors: role of long-wavelength inhomogeneities

Abstract

Recent experiments in moiré transition metal dichalcogenide materials have reported the observation of a continuous bandwidth-tuned transition from a metal to a paramagnetic Mott insulator at a fixed filling of one electron per moiré unit cell. The electrical transport measurements reveal a number of puzzling features that are seemingly at odds with the theoretical expectations of an interaction induced, but disorder-free, bandwidth-tuned metal-insulator transition. In this work, we include the effects of long-wavelength inhomogeneities, building on the results for a continuous metal-insulator transition at fixed filling in the clean limit. We examine the effects of meso-scale inhomogeneities near the critical point on transport using the framework of random resistor networks, highlighting the salient differences from a simple percolation-based picture. We place our results in the context of recent and ongoing experiments.

5 pages, 3 figures. Supplementary material: 4 pages, 5 figures

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• How to recognize the universal aspects of Mott criticality?
• Bipartite Fluctuations of Critical Fermi Surfaces
• Transfer learning from Hermitian to non-Hermitian quantum many-body physics
• Continuous Wigner-Mott transition at $\nu =1/5$
• Band structure picture for topology in strongly correlated systems with the ghost Gutzwiller ansatz