Through resistivity measurements of an organic crystal hosting massless Dirac fermions with a charge-ordering instability, we reveal the effect of interactions among Dirac fermions on the charge transport. A low-temperature resistivity upturn appears robustly irrespectively of pressure and is enhanced while approaching the critical pressure of charge ordering, indicating that the insulating behavior originates from short-range Coulomb interactions. Observation of apparently vanishing gap in the charge-ordered phase accords with the theoretical prediction of the non-topological edge states.
We investigate the charge and lattice states in a quasi-one-dimensional organic ferroelectric material, TTF-QCl4, under pressures of up to 35 kbar by nuclear quadrupole resonance experiments. The results reveal a global pressure-temperature phase diagram, which spans the electronic and ionic regimes of ferroelectric transitions, which have so far been studied separately, in a single material. The revealed phase diagram clearly shows that the charge-transfer instability and the lattice symmetry breaking, which coincide in the electronic ferroelectric regime at low pressures, bifurcate at a certain pressure, leading to the conventional ferroelectric regime. The present results reveal that the crossover from electronic to ionic ferroelectricity occurs through the separation of charge and lattice instabilities.
The concept of topology has been widely applied in condensed matter physics, leading to the identification of peculiar electronic states on three-dimensional (3D) surfaces or 2D lines separating topologically distinctive regions. In the systems explored so far, the topological boundaries are built-in walls; thus, their motional degrees of freedom, which potentially bring about new paradigms, have been experimentally inaccessible. Here, working with a quasi-1D organic material with a charge-transfer instability, we show that mobile neutral-ionic (dielectric-ferroelectric) domain boundaries with topological charges carry strongly 1D-confined and anomalously large electrical conduction with an energy gap much smaller than the one-particle excitation gap. This consequence is further supported by nuclear magnetic resonance detection of spin solitons, which are required for steady current of topological charges. The present observation of topological charge transport may open a new channel for broad charge transport–related phenomena such as thermoelectric effects.
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