Phenomenological classification of metals based on resistivity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a phenomenological framework using a parallel resistor model to classify metals based on resistivity, unifying diverse metallic behaviors and highlighting the universal origin of T-linear resistivity.

Contribution

It proposes a universal resistivity description applicable to all metals, linking different metallic classes to the relative contributions of T-linear and T-quadratic terms.

Findings

Resistivity can be described by a Taylor expansion with two main terms.

Metal classes are determined by the ratio of these terms and residual resistivity.

The T-linear term has a universal origin across metals.

Abstract

Efforts to understand metallic behaviour have led to important concepts such as those of strange metal, bad metal or Planckian metal. However, a unified description of metallic resistivity is still missing. An empirical analysis of a large variety of metals shows that the parallel resistor formalism used in the cuprates, which includes T-linear and T-quadratic dependence of the electron scattering rates, can be used to provide a phenomenological description of the electrical resistivity in all metals, where these two contributions are shown to correspond to the two first terms of a Taylor expansion of the resistivity, detached of their physics origin, and thus, valid for any metal. Here we show that the different metallic classes are then determined by the relative magnitude of these two components and the magnitude of the extrapolated residual resistivity. These two parameters allow to categorize a few systems that are notoriously hard to ascribe to one of the currently accepted metallic classes. This approach also reveals that the T-linear term has a common origin in all cases, strengthening the arguments that propose the universal character of the Planckian dissipation bound.