Lattice Relaxation Forward Negative Coulomb Drag in Hopping Regime

Abstract

Quasi-particle formed by electron and the dressed deformed lattice is important to accurately interpret the properties of various disordered/amorphous materials. However, a unified understanding of the drag effect, in particular the negative Coulomb drag in hopping systems, remains an open challenge. This work proposes a theoretic framework to account for both positive and negative Coulomb drag in dual-1D-hopping systems by considering both the electron-electron correlation and the electron-phonon correlation. It is found that lattice relaxation in the active line of the hopping system may give rise to an inverse energetic pumping force in the passive line, causing negative Coulomb drag. The mobility of the negative coulomb drag can approach the scale of 10−5cm2V−1s−1, especially at low temperature, high carrier-density, and narrow inter-spacing separation. More intriguingly, the positive drag could be recovered by varying the energy fluctuation and suppressing the electron-phonon interactions, but with a much lower magnitude. Our work could serve as a universal model for the Coulomb drag effect in the hopping system.