Physics. Driving the electron over the edge.
At low temperatures, many materials, from organics to oxides, undergo a pressure-driven "Mott transition": A small change in the distance between the atoms causes the electrical resistivity of the system to change by many orders of magnitude, without a change in crystal symmetry. In his Perspective, Kotliar highlights the report by Limelette et al., who have investigated the dependence of the resistivity of a doped vanadium oxide on pressure and temperature around the Mott critical endpoint (where the Mott transition becomes continuous). A purely electronic model accounts for the major features of the experiments, but some more detailed features require the coupling between electrons and the crystal lattice to be taken into account.
Kotliar
Gabriel
G
Physics Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA. kotliar@physics.rutgers.edu