Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten
DS 7: Thermoelectric and Phase Change Materials
DS 7.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 11:00–11:15, REC/B214
Classification of Metal - Insulator Transitions: Insights from characteristic Property Changes and related Quantum Mechanical Bonding Descriptors — •Tim Bartsch1, Raagya Arora4, Carl-Friedrich Schön1, Umesh Waghmare3, and Matthias Wuttig1,2 — 1I. Institute of Physics (IA), RWTH Aachen University, Germany — 2Peter Grünberg Institute - JARA-Institute Energy Efficient Information Technology (PGI-10), Jülich, Germany — 3Theoretical Sciences Unit, School of Advanced Materials JNCASR Jakkur, Bangalore 560064, India — 4John A. Paulson School of Engineering and appled science, Havard University, Cambridge Massachusetts
The nature of the transition between metals and insulators is one of the most fascinating topics in condensed matter physics. The end points of this transition are well-defined, i.e. a solid which has a non-vanishing electrical conductivity σ in the limit T * 0 K is a metal, while an insulator is characterized by σ = 0 S/m (T * 0 K). In 1980, Rosenbaum and co-workers investigated the metal-insulator transition in phosphorus-doped silicon, by measuring the low-temperature resistivity of samples with different doping concentrations. Here, we are pursuing a rather different goal. We are looking at a range of different crystalline insulators and check whether they can be classified as pressure-controlled MITs based on characteristic changes in their properties. Such pressure-driven MITs occur in all insulating solids at sufficiently high pressures when the orbital overlap of neighboring atoms increases sufficiently to favor a metallic state.
Keywords: Metal–Insulator transition; Chemical Bonding in solids; Metavalent Bonding