Strong disorder has a crucial effect on the electronic structure in quantum materials by increasing localization, interactions, and modifying the density of states. BixTeI films grown at room temperature and \SI{230}{K} exhibit dramatic magnetotransport effects due to disorder, localization and electron correlation effects, including a MIT at a composition that depends on growth temperature. The increased disorder caused by growth at 230K causes the conductivity to decrease by several orders of magnitude, for several compositions of BixTeI. The transition from metal to insulator with decreasing composition x is accompanied by a decrease in the dephasing length which leads to the disappearance of the weak-antilocalization effect. Electron-electron interactions cause low temperature conductivity corrections on the metallic side and Efros-Shklovskii (ES) variable range hopping on the insulating side, effects which are absent in single crystalline BixTeI. The observation of a tunable metal-insulator transition and the associated strong localization and quantum effects in BixTeI shows the possibility of tuning spin transport in quantum materials via disorder.
@article{arxiv.2305.16486,
title = {Disorder-driven localization and electron interactions in Bi$_x$TeI thin films},
author = {Paul Corbae and Nicolai Taufertshöfer and Ellis Kennedy and Mary Scott and Frances Hellman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16486},
year = {2023}
}