Anomalous electronic transport in Quasicrystals and related Complex Metallic Alloys

Abstract

We analyze the transport properties in approximants of quasicrystals alpha-AlMnSi, 1/1-AlCuFe and for the complex metallic phase lambda-AlMn. These phases presents strong analogies in their local atomic structures and are related to existing quasicrystalline phases. Experimentally they present unusual transport properties with low conductivities and a mix of metallic-like and insulating-like characteristics. We compute the band structure and the quantum diffusion in the perfect structure without disorder and introduce simple approximations that allow to treat the effect of disorder. Our results demonstrate that the standard Bloch-Boltzmann theory is not applicable to these intermetallic phases. Indeed their dispersion relation are flat indicating small band velocities and corrections to quantum diffusion that are not taken into account in the semi-classical Bloch-Boltzmann scheme become dominant. We call this regime the small velocity regime. A simple Relaxation Time Approximation to treat the effect of disorder allows us to reproduce the main experimental facts on conductivity qualitatively and even quantitatively.