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Doping a semiconductor to create an unconventional metal

Nature volume 454, pages 976–980 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

Landau–Fermi liquid theory, with its pivotal assertion that electrons in metals can be simply understood as independent particles with effective masses replacing the free electron mass, has been astonishingly successful. This is true despite the Coulomb interactions an electron experiences from the host crystal lattice, lattice defects and the other ∼1022 cm-3 electrons. An important extension to the theory accounts for the behaviour of doped semiconductors1,2. Because little in the vast literature on materials contradicts Fermi liquid theory and its extensions, exceptions have attracted great attention, and they include the high-temperature superconductors3, silicon-based field-effect transistors that host two-dimensional metals4, and certain rare-earth compounds at the threshold of magnetism5,6,7,8. The origin of the non-Fermi liquid behaviour in all of these systems remains controversial. Here we report that an entirely different and exceedingly simple class of materials—doped small-bandgap semiconductors near a metal–insulator transition—can also display a non-Fermi liquid state. Remarkably, a modest magnetic field functions as a switch which restores the ordinary disordered Fermi liquid. Our data suggest that we have found a physical realization of the only mathematically rigorous route to a non-Fermi liquid, namely the ‘undercompensated Kondo effect’, where there are too few mobile electrons to compensate for the spins of unpaired electrons localized on impurity atoms9,10,11,12.

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Figure 1: Magnetic susceptibility and phase diagram.
Figure 2: Magnetotransport.
Figure 3: Specific heat.
Figure 4: Underscreened Kondo effect.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Z. Fisk for discussions. J.F.D. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation and G.A. acknowledges support from a Wolfson-Royal Society Research Merit Award and the Basic Technologies Programme of the UK Research Councils.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803, USA,

    N. Manyala & J. F. DiTusa

  2. London Centre for Nanotechnology and Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCL, London WC1E 6BT, UK,

    G. Aeppli

  3. Department of Physics and Electronics, National University of Lesotho, P. O. Roma 180, Maseru 100, Lesotho,

    N. Manyala

  4. Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA ,

    A. P. Ramirez

Authors
  1. N. Manyala
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  2. J. F. DiTusa
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  3. G. Aeppli
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  4. A. P. Ramirez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to J. F. DiTusa.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Notes

The file contains Supplementary Notes on the magnetoconductance and the magnetization of the materials presented in the main paper. It includes references and figure captions for the two Supplementary Figures S1-S2. (PDF 291 kb)

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Manyala, N., DiTusa, J., Aeppli, G. et al. Doping a semiconductor to create an unconventional metal. Nature 454, 976–980 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07137

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