Quantified Degeneracy, Entropy and Metal-Insulator Transition in Complex Transition-Metal Oxides

Understanding complex correlated oxides and their phase transitions has long been a challenge. The difficulty largely arises from the intriguing interplay between multiple degrees of freedoms. While degeneracy can play an important role in determining material characteristics, there is no well-defined way to quantify and to unveil its role in real materials having complicated band structures. Here we suggest a way to quantify the `effective degeneracy' relevant to metal-insulator transition by introducing entropy-like terms. This new quantity well describes the electronic behaviors of transition-metal oxides as a function of external and internal parameters. With $3d$ titanates, $4d$ ruthenates, and $5d$ iridates as our examples, we show that this new effective quantity provides useful insights to understand these systems and their phase transitions. For LaTiO$_3$/LaAlO$_3$ superlattice, we suggest a novel `degeneracy control' metal-insulator transition.