Prototypical many-body signatures in transport properties of semiconductors

Abstract

We devise a methodology for charge, heat, and entropy transport driven by carriers with finite lifetimes. Combining numerical simulations with analytical expressions for low temperatures, we establish a comprehensive and thermodynamically consistent phenomenology for transport properties in semiconductors. We demonstrate that the scattering rate (inverse lifetime) is a relevant energy scale: It causes the emergence of several characteristic features in each transport observable. The theory is capable to reproduce, with only a minimal input electronic structure, the full temperature profiles measured in correlated narrow-gap semiconductors. In particular, we account for the previously elusive low-T saturation of the resistivity and the Hall coefficient, as well as the (linear) vanishing of the Seebeck and Nernst coefficients in systems such as FeSb2, FeAs2, RuSb2, and FeGa3.