Layered transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) host competing electronic states that can be tuned by external perturbations, providing a platform to explore the interplay between disorder, electronic structure, and quantum transport. Here we investigate magnetotransport in bulk semiconducting 2H-MoTe2 under hydrostatic pressure. At ambient pressure, transport evolves from high-temperature metallic behavior into activated conduction and ultimately a strongly localized variable-range hopping regime, accompanied by a pronounced magnetotransport anomaly near 45 K and large, nonsaturating magnetoresistance extending up to an unprecedented field of 60 T in semiconducting 2H-MoTe2. Under compression to 15.6 GPa, the insulating state is rapidly suppressed and a low-resistivity regime emerges in which quantum interference dominates, exhibiting a crossover from weak antilocalization (WAL) to weak localization (WL) at low temperatures. A physically motivated phenomenological description captures the magnetoresistance across these regimes and yields a characteristic electronic length scale that remains comparable across the localized and quantum-interference regimes. First-principles calculations reveal a continuous pressure-driven collapse of the bandgap into a semimetallic electronic structure. These results establish a unified picture of pressure-tuned transport spanning hopping and quantum-coherent regimes.
@article{arxiv.2604.21336,
title = {Pressure-Tuned Competing Electronic States in Layered Tellurides},
author = {Mahmoud Abdel-Hafiez and Govindaraj Lingannan and D. A. Chareev and A. N. Vasiliev and Anas Abutaha and Kadir Can Dogan and Mehmet Yagmurcukardes and Mehmet Egilmez and Hasan Sahin and Sami El-Khatib},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.21336},
year = {2026}
}