Tunneling and Percolation in Metal-Insulator Composite Materials

Abstract

In many composites the electrical transport takes place only by tunneling between isolated particles. For a long time it was quite a puzzle how, in spite of the incompatibility of tunneling and percolation networks, these composites conform well to percolation theory. We found, by conductance atomic force microscopy measurements on granular metals, that it is the apparent cut-off of the tunneling to non-nearest neighbors that brings about this behavior. In particular, the percolation cluster is shown to consist of the nearest-neighbors sub-network of the full tunneling network.

12 pages, 3 figures, accepted to Phys. Rev. B. Rapid Communication

References in corpus (1)

• Tomographic-like reconstruction of the percolation cluster as a phase transition

Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Percolation-to-hopping crossover in conductor-insulator composites
• Theory of percolation and tunneling regimes in nanogranular metal films
• Full Connectivity: Corners, edges and faces
• Segregated tunneling-percolation model for transport nonuniversality
• Observation of double percolation transitions in Ag-SnO${}_2$ nanogranular films
• Dimensional effects on the tunneling conductivity of gold-implanted nanocomposite films
• Anisotropic generalization of Stinchcombe's solution for conductivity of random resistor network on a Bethe lattice
• Crossover From Cooper-Pair Hopping to Single-Electron Hopping in Pb${}_x$(TiO${}_2$)${}_{1-x}$ Granular Films