Giant dielectric constants at the approach to the insulator-metal transition

Abstract

We have measured the real and imaginary parts of the dielectric susceptibility of insulating samples of P-doped Si at millikelvin temperatures at 400 MHz using a resonant transmission cavity. We find that the real part is enhanced by more than two orders of magnitude over the isolated donor polarizability, and we determine the exponent which describes the critical divergence of the real part at the insulator-metal transition by fitting the temperature dependence of the corresponding imaginary part. The form of the observed divergence remains unexplained theoretically.