Quantum transport regimes in quartic dispersion materials with Anderson disorder

Abstract

Mexican-hat-shaped quartic dispersion manifests itself in certain families of single-layer twodimensional hexagonal crystals such as compounds of groups III-VI and groups IV-V as well as elemental crystals of group V. Quartic band forms the valence band edge in various of these structures, and some of the experimentally confirmed structures are GaS, GaSe, InSe, SnSb and blue phosphorene. Here, we numerically investigate strictly-one-dimensional (1D) and quasi-one dimensional (Q1D) nanoribbons with quartic dispersion and systematically study the effects of Anderson disorder on their transport properties with the help of a minimal tight-binding model and Landauer formalism. We compare the analytical expression for the scaling function with simulation data to deduce about the domains of diffusion and localization regimes. In 1D, it is shown that conductance drops dramatically at the quartic band edge compared to a quadratic band. As for the Q1D nanoribbons, a set of singularities emerge close to the band edge, which suppress conductance and lead to short mean-free-paths and localization lengths. Interestingly, wider nanoribbons can have shorter mean-free-paths because of denser singularities. However, the localization lengths do not necessarily follow the same trend. The results display the peculiar effects of quartic dispersion on transport in disordered systems.