On holographic disorder-driven metal-insulator transitions

Abstract

We give a minimal holographic model of a disorder-driven metal-insulator transition. It consists in a CFT with a charge sector and a translation-breaking sector that interact in the most generic way allowed by the symmetries and by dynamical consistency. In the gravity dual, it reduces to a Massive Gravity-Maxwell model with new direct couplings between the Maxwell and metric that are allowed when gravity is massive. We show that, generically, the effect of disorder is to decrease the DC electrical conductivity. This happens to such an extent that the conductivity does not obey any lower bound and can be very small in the insulating phase. In some cases, the large disorder limit produces gradient instabilities that hint at the formation of modulated phases.