Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.

Science 3 October 2003:
Vol. 302. no. 5642, pp. 67 - 69
DOI: 10.1126/science.1090580
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Perspectives

PHYSICS:
Driving the Electron Over the Edge

Gabriel Kotliar

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.

The author is in the Physics Department, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA. E-mail: kotliar{at}physics.rutgers.edu

Read the Full Text

To Advertise     Find Products

Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)