Studying resistance fluctuations in insulator-metal transitions using nonequilibrum Ginzburg-Landau free energy

We study insulator-metal transitions using a microscopic nonequilibrium free energy based model derived in an earlier study^[1]. Our study explores the dynamics of the resistance fluctuations near the transition point for thermal and voltage-driven insulator-metal transitions. Our finding show that the resistance noise has a 1/f² behavior near the transition point. This is experimentally observed in thermal and voltage-driven metal-insulator transition in correlated CuIr2S₄. Our free energy model explains the resistance noise behavior in alignment with the experimental observations on correlated CuIr₂S₄ and successfully simulates the electronic phase separation observed in such correlated systems. At the transition the spatial inhomogeneity of the electric current is captured by studying the evolution of the domain structure near transition using resistor network theory.

[1] Han, J. E., Li, J., Aron, C., & Kotliar, G. (2018). Physical Review B, 98(3), 035145.