Conductivity of two-dimensional narrow gap semiconductors subjected to strong Coulomb disorder

Abstract: In the ideal disorder-free situation, a two-dimensional band gap insulator has an activation energy for conductivity equal to half the band gap $\Delta$. But transport experiments usually exhibit a much smaller activation energy at low temperature, and the relation between this activation energy and $\Delta$ is unclear. Here we consider the temperature-dependent conductivity of a two-dimensional insulator on a substrate containing Coulomb impurities, with random potential amplitude $\Gamma \gg \Delta$. We show that the conductivity generically exhibits three regimes of conductivity, and only the highest temperature regime exhibits an activation energy that reflects the band gap. At lower temperatures, the conduction proceeds through activated hopping or Efros-Shklovskii variable-range hopping between electron and hole puddles created by the disorder. We show that the activation energy and characteristic temperature associated with these processes steeply collapse near a critical impurity concentration. Larger concentrations lead to an exponentially small activation energy and exponentially long localization length, which in mesoscopic samples can appear as a disorder-induced insulator-to-metal transition. We also arrive at a similar steep disorder driven insulator-metal transition in thin films of three-dimensional topological insulators with large dielectric constant, for which Coulomb impurities inside the film create a large disorder potential due to confinement of their electric field inside the film.