Optical conductivity of metal alloys with residual resistivities near or above the Mott-Ioffe-Regel limit

G. D. Samolyuk, C. C. Homes, A. F. May, S. Mu, K. Jin, H. Bei, G. M. Stocks, B. C. Sales

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6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Most interesting examples of violations of the Mott-Ioffe-Regel (MIR) resistivity limit are found in materials with strong electronic correlations that are not well understood by theory. We demonstrate that first principles theory can predict the experimentally observed frequency dependence of the optical conductivity for a novel class of metals where the residual resistivity is near or above the MIR limit, which we define as a "bad metal." The predicted optical conductivity of a NiCoCr alloy is in good agreement with experiment. It is demonstrated that the width of the Drude peak describing the low-frequency part of optical conductivity is comparable to the Fermi energy. The latter, together with a mean free path comparable to the interatomic distance, indicates the absence of well-defined quasiparticles. In contrast to traditional bad metals with strong electron-electron interactions, both the high resistivity and the large width of the Drude peak in these alloys result from strong scattering on disordered atomic potentials that can be understood using modern density functionals.

Original languageEnglish
Article number075128
JournalPhysical Review B
Volume100
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 14 2019

Funding

We thank David Mandrus whose critical review greatly improved the clarity of the manuscript, and Gabor Halasz and Satoshi Okamoto for useful discussions. This work was equally supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division (B.C.S. and A.F.M.-resistivity data; C.C.H.-optical conductivity measurements) and the Energy/Dissipation Evolution (EDDE), an Energy Frontier Research Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (G.D.S., G.M.S., and S.M.-theoretical calculations; K.J. and H.B.-single-crystal growth). Work at Brookhaven National Laboratory was supported by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-SC0012704 We thank David Mandrus whose critical review greatly improved the clarity of the manuscript, and Gabor Halasz and Satoshi Okamoto for useful discussions. This work was equally supported by the U. S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division (B.C.S. and A.F.M.—resistivity data; C.C.H.—optical conductivity measurements) and the Energy/Dissipation Evolution (EDDE), an Energy Frontier Research Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (G.D.S., G.M.S., and S.M.—theoretical calculations; K.J. and H.B.—single-crystal growth). Work at Brookhaven National Laboratory was supported by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract No. DE-SC0012704.

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