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Doped Mott insulators

Breaking through to the other side

Nature Physics volume 6, pages 566–567 (2010)Cite this article

A superconductor that can be doped with elements that add electrons or take them away may finally lead to a clearer understanding of the transition from an insulator to a superconductor.

Shortly after the recognition that insulators such as NiO were predicted to be metals by the newly developed band theory, Nevill Mott postulated that strong electron–electron repulsion could lead to a new type of insulator1. Fifty years later, Mott insulators went viral. Superconductors with the highest recorded transition temperatures were found when Mott insulators such as La2CuO4 were 'doped' by adding or removing a small fraction of their electrons. Understanding how a superconductor arises from a Mott insulator has proved to be a tricky problem — in large part because the connection between idealized theoretical models and real-world materials remains unclear. For example, to dissect a Mott insulator and examine whether it contains the seed to superconductivity, we would like to study what happens when a small number of electrons are either added or removed. Yet, until the discovery reported2 by Kouji Segawa et al. in Nature Physics, there were no examples of a single Mott insulating material that could be made to conduct by both addition and removal of electrons (or equivalently, addition of holes). Segawa and co-workers report intriguing results at very low doping levels, where a marked difference in properties of electron- and hole-doped materials is manifest.

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Figure 1: Temperature–doping phase diagram.
Figure 2: Fundamental asymmetry in the CuO2 planes.

References

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  1. J. Orenstein and A. Vishwanath are in the Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA,

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  1. J. Orenstein
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  2. A. Vishwanath
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Orenstein, J., Vishwanath, A. Breaking through to the other side. Nature Phys 6, 566–567 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1751

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