text:
# A low density finite temperature apparent “insulating” phase in 2D systems

\[

## Abstract

We propose that the observed low density “insulating” phase of a 2D semiconductor system, with the carrier density being just below ($`n<n_c`$) the so-called critical density where the derivative of resistivity changes sign at low temperatures (i.e. resistivity $`\rho (T)`$ increases with increasing $`T`$ for $`n>n_c`$ whereas it decreases with increasing $`T`$ for $`n<n_c`$), is in fact a “high-temperature” crossover version of the same effective metallic phase seen at higher densities ($`n>n_c`$). This low density ($`n<n_c`$) finite temperature crossover 2D effective insulating phase is characterized by $`\rho (T)`$ with power law temperature dependence in contrast to the truly insulating state (occurring at still lower densities) whose resistivity increases exponentially with decreasing temperature.

PACS Number : 71.30.+h; 73.40.Qv

\]

The so-called 2D metallic phase, first identified  in n-Si MOSFETs by Kravchenko and collaborators, is still a subject of considerable interest and controversy . Although the effectively metallic character (albeit at finite temperatures) of this phase is well-established experimentally in many 2D systems, it is still not known whether a true $`T=0`$ 2D metal exists. The nature of the associated 2D metal-insulator-transition (2D MIT) as a function of carrier density ($`n`$) is also a mystery (particularly since a noninteracting disordered 2D system at $`T=0`$ is known on firm theoretical grounds not to undergo any MIT as all states in 2D are localized in the presence of finite disorder ). There is increasing evidence that the putative 2D “metallic” phase, while being a perfectly good “effective” metal down to $`T=50100mK`$ where experiments have so far been carried out, is essentially a finite temperature effective metal with screening  and related electron-electron interaction effects  playing important quantitative roles in determining the temperature dependent resistivity (and producing the effective metallic behavior). It should also be emphasized that no reasonable model or theory for a $`T=0`$ strongly-correlated 2D metal (stabilized presumably by electron-electron interaction in the presence of disorder) has been put forward in the literature. (Such a true 2D metal, if it exists at $`T=0`$, cannot be a Fermi liquid since the corresponding noninteracting 2D system is an insulator at $`T=0`$ .) The observed 2D metallic phase shows strong temperature dependence ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) which is nominally unexpected in a metal at low temperatures where phonons freeze out in the low temperature Bloch-Grüneisen regime. We have argued, on the basis of concrete calculations, that the strong temperature dependence in the resistivity in the effective metallic phase is caused by a temperature dependent effective disorder arising from the strong temperature dependence of low density 2D screening . This view point of the metallic temperature dependence has received further support from recent theoretical calculations of interaction corrections to 2D resistivity generalizing the screening theory . Unlike 3D metals, where $`q_{TF}/2k_F1`$ and $`T/T_F1`$ (where $`q_{TF}`$, $`k_F`$, $`T_F`$ are the Thomas-Fermi screening wave vector, the Fermi wave vector, and the Fermi temperature, respectively), the semiconductor-based 2D systems at low carrier densities could typically have $`q_{TF}/2k_F1`$ and $`T/T_F1`$, engendering strong screening-induced temperature dependence in the resistivity arising from the strong temperature dependence in the screened impurity disorder scattering in contrast to 3D metals where any temperature dependence of disorder scattering is exponentially suppressed at low temperatures.

In this paper we extend our screening calculations to very low densities (below $`n_c`$, the apparent critical density for the MIT), where the experimental resistivity increases with decreasing temperature ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) indicating the existence of a nominally insulating phase. Quite surprisingly we predict the existence of an effective “insulating” phase defined by $`d\rho /dT<0`$ at intermediate $`T`$ and low n, arising from the same temperature dependent disorder effect which produces the effective metallic phase ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) at low T and high n. We find that for a range of densities below $`n_c`$ our calculated resistivity, $`\rho (T,n)`$, as a function of temperature ($`T`$) and density ($`n`$), exhibits striking qualitative similarity to the experimentally observed $`\rho (T,nn_c)`$ , where the resistivity increases with decreasing $`T`$ (i.e. $`d\rho /dT<0`$) in a rather slowly rising approximate power law manner in contrast to the thermal exponential (either Mott variable range hopping or activated) behavior expected of a true $`T=0`$ insulator. The strongly insulating phase (which is beyond the scope of our theory) may occur at still lower densities where $`\rho (T)`$ would rise exponentially with decreasing temperature. Our theory applies to all 2D systems where the 2D MIT has been reported, and most significantly, in some systems (such as high mobility 2D $`n`$\- and $`p`$-GaAs) the observed 2D insulating phase seems to be entirely the novel low density effective insulating phase identified in this paper as the exponential insulating behavior seems not to manifest itself in high-quality GaAs systems except perhaps at the lowest densities and temperatures. An important salient feature of this low density novel phase (with $`d\rho /dT<0`$) is that it is purely a temperature-induced crossover behavior, and as such the critical density $`n_c`$ at which the 2D system crosses over to this phase (as $`n`$ is decreased from above $`n_c`$ to below) is completely non-universal, being a function of temperature itself, i.e. $`n_cn_c(T)`$, with the effective critical density $`n_c`$ progressively decreasing with decreasing carrier temperature. The experimentally determined “critical” density is then $`n_c`$($`T=T_{\mathrm{min}}`$) where $`T_{\mathrm{min}}`$($`50300mK`$ depending on the experiment) is the effective minimum temperature to which the 2D carrier system (and not the background bath) can be cooled down (typically $`T_{\mathrm{min}}T_{\mathrm{bath}}`$ in 2D semiconductor systems for low values of $`T_{\mathrm{bath}}`$). Such a non-universal behavior for the critical density defining 2D MIT, namely that $`n_cn_c(T)`$ with the observed effective $`n_c`$ decreasing with decreasing temperature, has been pointed out experimentally . In particular, our theory specifically rules out a sharp (temperature independent) separatrix delineating the effective metallic ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) and the effective insulating ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) phase in the 2D MIT phenomenon. We emphasize that the experimental evidence for a sharp separatrix in the 2D MIT is extremely sparse, and most 2D MIT experiments observe a temperature dependent crossover density $`n_c(T)`$ separating $`d\rho /dT>0`$ for $`n>n_c`$ and $`d\rho /dT<0`$ for $`n<n_c`$ in agreement with our theory.

We refer to this novel (low $`n`$/intermediate $`T`$) crossover “insulating” ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) phase as an “apparent” insulating phase in order to emphasize the fact that this phase is $`not`$ a true insulating phase at $`T=0`$, but is rather a low density (and “high” temperature) metallic phase where $`\rho (T)`$ decreases with increasing temperature in a power law fashion. This newly identified effective insulating phase (i.e. $`d\rho /dT<0`$) is only an apparent phase since lowering temperature further (at a fixed $`n<n_c`$) will eventually cause a temperature-induced re-entrance into the effective metallic phase at sufficiently low temperatures which, however, may not be accessible experimentally making the apparent insulating phase to appear to be a true insulating phase due to this low-$`T`$ cut off. We emphasize that the hallmark of our proposed apparent insulating phase is the approximate power law temperature dependence of the resistivity in contrast to a true insulating phase where $`\rho (T)`$ diverges exponentially with decreasing temperature. All localization effects, either weak or strong, are neglected in our theory. This is entirely consistent with our motivation of trying to understand carrier transport in a “high temperature phase” where quantum interference effects should be small. The Boltzmann theory, described below, should be well-valid for this effective high-temperature semiclassical phase independent of the actual value of the resistivity.

We calculate the resistivity of a 2D carrier system scattering off random charged impurity centers with a screened Coulomb impurity scattering potential. Within the Drude-Boltzmann semiclassical transport theory with the carrier-impurity interaction treated in the standard ensemble averaged Born approximation, we can express the 2D resistivity $`\rho `$ as

$$\rho ^1=ne^2\tau /m,$$
(1)
where $`m`$ is the carrier effective mass assuming a parabolic band effective mass approximation for the semiconductor band structure with $`n`$ being the 2D carrier density. The thermally averaged scattering time $`\tau `$ can be written, within the Drude-Boltzmann semiclassical theory (and the standard relaxation time approximation), as

$$\tau \tau _E=\frac{𝑑E\tau (E)E\left(\frac{f}{E}\right)}{𝑑EE\left(\frac{f}{E}\right)},$$
(2)
where $`\mathrm{}_E`$ indicates an energy averaging over the carrier thermal distribution function $`f(E)=[1+\mathrm{exp}\{\beta (E\mu )\}]^1`$ with $`\mu \mu (T,n)`$ as the finite temperature chemical potential ($`\beta =1/k_BT`$) given by $`\mu =\frac{1}{\beta }\mathrm{ln}[1+\mathrm{exp}(\beta E_F)]`$ for a 2D system (note that $`\mu =E_F`$ at $`T=0`$, but $`\mu `$ at finite T could be substantially different and is negative for $`T>1.4T_F`$). The central quantity of interest is therefore the energy dependent transport relaxation time (i.e. the scattering time) $`\tau (E)`$, which in the Born approximation is given by

$`\tau ^1(E)|_{E=ϵ_𝐤}`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{2\pi }{\mathrm{}}}{\displaystyle \underset{𝐤^{}}{}}{\displaystyle \underset{\alpha }{}}{\displaystyle _{\mathrm{}}^{\mathrm{}}}𝑑zN_i^{(\alpha )}(z)|u_{𝐤𝐤^{}}^{(\alpha )}(z)|^2`$ (3)
$`\times `$ $`(1\mathrm{cos}\theta _{\mathrm{𝐤𝐤}^{}})\delta (ϵ_𝐤ϵ_𝐤^{}),`$ (4)
where $`ϵ_𝐤=\mathrm{}^2k^2/2m`$ is the effective mass band energy of the 2D carriers with $`k|𝐤|`$ as the 2D wave vector, and $`N_i`$ is the three dimensional volume density of the random charged impurity centers of the $`\alpha `$-th kind (we allow, in general, of different kinds of quenched disorder in the problem arising from the distributions of different types of random charged impurity centers in the 2D system) — we take $`z`$ direction to be the confinement direction perpendicular to the relevant 2D plane of confinement of the carrier system. In Eq. (3) $`u_q^{(\alpha )}(z)`$ is the 2D (in the $`x`$-$`y`$ plane) Fourier transform of the 3D screened electron-impurity interaction in the system defined to be

$$u_q^{(\alpha )}(z_i)=\frac{2\pi Z^{(\alpha )}e^2F(q,z_i)}{\overline{\kappa }qϵ(q)},$$
(5)
where the effective dielectric function $`ϵ(q)`$ is given by

$$ϵ(q)=1\frac{2\pi e^2}{\overline{\kappa }q}f(q)\mathrm{\Pi }(q),$$
(6)
where $`\mathrm{\Pi }(q)`$ is the finite temperature static 2D noninteracting polarizability function and $`\overline{\kappa }`$ as the background static lattice dielectric constant. (We have carried out calculations also by including several different local field corrections in the 2D polarizability, but our qualitative results remain unaffected and therefore we will only present here RPA screening results where $`\mathrm{\Pi }`$ is the 2D non-interacting static polarizability.) In Eqs. (4) and (5) $`F(q,z_i)`$ and $`f(q)`$ are respectively the 2D subband form-factors for electron-impurity and electron-electron interactions, associated with the finite width of carrier wavefunctions in the $`z`$ direction. These form factors are essential for quantitative accuracy, most particularly at the very low carrier densities of our interest where the quasi-2D electron layer spreads considerably in the transverse direction making the strict 2D approximation highly unreliable. We calculate the form factors by using the Fang-Howard-Stern variational wavefunctions for the quasi-2D layer . For more details on the theory see refs.  and .

We have carried out extensive calculations of $`dc`$ transport, based on the above-described Boltzmann theory, in several different 2D systems of current interest (i.e. systems where an apparent MIT, as reflected in the change of sign in $`d\rho /dT`$ at some low density, has been experimentally observed) at low temperatures ($`T=50mK5K`$) and densities ($`n`$ around, $`nn_c`$, the reported critical densities being $`n_c10^{11},`$ $`10^{10}`$, $`10^9cm^2`$ for typical high quality n-Si-MOS, p-GaAs, and n-GaAs systems respectively). Before presenting our numerical results for $`\rho (T,n)`$ in Figs. 1 - 3, we first discuss qualitatively the theoretical results expected on the basis of Eqs. (1) - (5) in various temperature and density regimes. The dimensionless temperature, $`T/T_Fn^1`$, plays an important role in our calculated temperature and density dependence 2D resistivity $`\rho (T,n)`$.

First, a straightforward asymptotic expansion of the Boltzmann transport equation shows that, for $`T/T_F1`$, the resistivity can be written as $`\rho =\rho _0+\mathrm{\Delta }\rho (T)`$, where $`\rho _0=\rho (T=0)`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }\rho `$ is given at very low temperature by

$$\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\rho (TT_F)}{\rho _0}A_1\left(\frac{T}{T_F}\right)+A_{3/2}\left(\frac{T}{T_F}\right)^{3/2}B_2\left(\frac{T}{T_F}\right)^2,$$
(7)
where $`A_1(>0)`$, $`A_{3/2}(>0)`$ arise from the thermal smearing of the electronic polarizability at $`2k_F`$ wave vector, and $`B_2(>0)`$ arises from the thermal energy averaging over the Fermi surface. Note that the first two screening terms in Eq. (6) are both positive, indicating an increasing resistivity with increasing temperature (the so-called 2D metallic behavior) due to the suppression of screening at finite temperatures whereas the third term, arising from the thermal energy averaging in Eq. (2), is a negative correction to resistivity (i.e. a positive correction to conductivity) due to the increased thermal velocity of the carriers at finite temperatures. The expansions for $`A_1`$, $`A_{3/2}`$, and $`B_2`$ have earlier been derived in the literature :

$$A_1=2\left(1+\frac{1}{fq_0}\right)^1,$$
(8)
$$A_{3/2}=2.646\left(1+\frac{1}{fq_0}\right)^2,$$
(9)
$$B_2=\frac{\pi ^2}{6}p(p+1),$$
(10)
where $`q_0=q_{TF}/2k_F`$, $`ff(q=2k_F)`$ is the 2D subband form-factor (defining the deviation from the strict two dimensionality in the layer) at wave vector $`2k_F`$, and $`p`$ $`(1)`$ gives the energy dependence of the scattering time in Eq. (3), i.e. $`\tau (E)E^p`$ for $`EE_F`$. Three important feature of the asymptotic expansion given in Eq. (6) need to be emphasized: (1) The $`A`$ and the $`B`$ terms in Eq. (6) arise from totally different physics, and therefore we have neglected a possible $`A_2(T/T_F)^2`$ term in the screening expansion in Eq. (6) which may very well modify the $`B_2`$ term to $`B_2^{}(B_2A_2)`$. We use Eq. (6) only for the purpose of qualitative discussion, and all our results are based on the full numerical calculation of the semiclassical transport equations (Eqs. (1) - (5)) making any qualitative difference between $`B_2`$ and $`B_2^{}`$ irrelevant for our results. (2) There are higher-order interaction corrections for all the terms in Eq. (6), but these corrections are quantitatively unknown and are therefore left out of our discussion completely. (3) The asymptotic expansion only holds at very low temperature ($`T/T_F1`$) which may not be of relevance to the 2D MIT phenomena . Details on the low temperature transport behavior can be found in our recent work . Here we are interested in the “high temperature” resistivity, which is manifestly not given by Eq. (6).

It is possible to obtain the asymptotic high temperature result for the classical limit ($`TT_F`$) of the 2D resistivity defined through Eqs. (1) - (6), and the result is

$$\rho (TT_F)(T_F/T),$$
(11)
indicating that the “high temperature” resistivity decreases with increasing temperature in an apparently “insulating-like” manner (i.e. $`d\rho /dT<0`$ for $`TT_F`$). This can be rather easily understood physically based on the fact that at high temperatures the main effect arises from the thermal increase in the average carrier velocity which obviously leads to a decreasing resistivity. Thus, the linear power law resistivity, $`\rho T^1`$, in Eq. (10) arises from the energy averaging in Eq. (2).

Even before carrying out the full numerical calculations it is obvious that any smooth interpolation between the “low temperature” behavior of Eq. (6) and the “high temperature” behavior of Eq. (10) would exhibit non-monotonic temperature dependent resistivity  associated with this quantum-classical crossover, which has been seen  experimentally. This leads to the following generic temperature dependence of $`\rho (T/T_F)`$: At very low temperatures $`\rho `$ is linear in $`T/T_F`$ with $`d\rho /dT`$ ($`>0`$) being determined by the absolute value of the coefficient $`A_1`$; with increasing $`T/T_F`$ (but with $`T/T_F<1`$) it is possible (but not necessarily essential) for $`d\rho /dT`$ to change sign becoming negative, $`d\rho /dT<0`$, if the $`B_2`$ term can overcome the effects of the first two positive terms within the constraint $`T/T_F<1`$. This obviously depends on the relative values of coefficients $`A_1`$, $`A_{3/2}`$, and $`B_2`$. In Si (100) inversion layer and in p-GaAs system screening effects are strong leading to $`A_1`$, $`A_{3/2}B_2`$ so that at low $`T/T_F`$ the metallic resistivity, $`d\rho /dT>0`$, dominates. In n-GaAs 2D system, on the other hand, screening effects are weak (since the density of states is small) and for modest values of $`T/T_F`$, the $`B_2`$ term is larger than the first two terms, particularly at high densities where $`2k_Fq_{TF}`$, leading to $`d\rho /dT<0`$ for moderate values of $`T/T_F`$. (In fact, this is also expected in highly disordered systems where screening effects may be cut off by impurity scattering at a characteristic temperature $`T_D`$ which may not be too low.) The message from the analytical results of Eqs. (6) - (9) is therefore clear: A 2D system would always exhibit “metallic” resistivity (defined as $`d\rho /dT>0`$) for the lowest value of the dimensionless temperature $`T/T_F`$ (ignoring all weak localization effects which we neglect throughout this paper) crossing over to an apparent “insulating” (defined as $`d\rho /dT<0`$, but not with an exponential temperature dependence) resistivity at some intermediate temperature, $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$, where “metallic” ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) screening effects are overwhelmed by the “insulating” ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) thermal averaging effects. If the carrier density of the 2D system is effectively low so that $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ is lower than the lowest achievable carrier temperature ($`T_{\mathrm{min}}`$) in the system, then the 2D system will manifest an apparent insulating phase ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) down to the lowest experimental temperature $`T`$ ($`>T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) since the low temperatures ($`T<T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) where the screening effect dominates for a crossover to the metallic behavior ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) cannot be achieved. We note that it is possible in many situations, depending on carrier densities and system parameters (e.g. effective mass, type of impurity scattering, etc.), for $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}<T_F`$. Remembering that $`T_F0.7\stackrel{~}{n}`$ K (Si and p-GaAs) and $`4\stackrel{~}{n}`$ K (n-GaAs) where $`\stackrel{~}{n}`$ is the 2D carrier density measured in the units of $`10^{10}cm^2`$, we conclude that $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ could be as low as $`100mK`$ (in some situations) for 2D carrier densities around $`10^{10}cm^2`$ for n-Si (and p-GaAs) and $`10^9cm^2`$ for n-GaAs systems. A characteristic fundamental feature for the crossover we are discussing here is the strong dependence of the crossover temperature on the carrier density with $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ increasing strongly with carrier density. The other important feature is the non-existence of the apparent insulating ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) phase at low enough temperature ($`T<T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$), i.e. if the carrier temperature of a 2D system can be decreased arbitrarily then (leaving out all localization effects) the system would always become metallic ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) at low enough temperatures (defined as $`TT_{\mathrm{cross}}`$).

Our numerical transport results shown in Figs. 1 - 3 for p-GaAs and n-GaAs respectively bear out the theoretical considerations outlined above. In particular, the calculated resistivity is always metallic at the lowest temperatures, manifesting a clear crossover to an insulating behavior at $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ with a change of sign in $`d\rho /dT`$ (i.e. $`d\rho /dT>0`$ for $`T<T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ and $`d\rho /dT<0`$ for $`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) as described above. We note that $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ could be quite

low for low values of carrier density, and therefore it is possible, in principle, for the apparent insulating behavior to arise entirely from this crossover effect. In particular, in Fig. 1 we choose (rather arbitrarily) the lowest possible achievable carrier temperature to be $`300mK500mK`$ (for the purpose of illustration) and show what a typical 2D MIT transport data set (in the $`T=300mK3K`$ range) would look like based entirely on this finite temperature crossover phenomenon. The overall qualitative consistency between our results and many of the existing 2D MIT experimental results in the literature suggests that the simple (and physically appealing) crossover scenario presented in this paper cannot be entirely ruled out as the cause for the 2D MIT behavior observed experimentally at least in some situations. We note a quantitative discrepancy between our theory and experiment: in general, we find $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ in our theory to be higher than the corresponding crossover temperature in the experiment. (This discrepancy can be corrected by introducing a cut-off $`T_D`$ in the screening as discussed later in this paper.)

It is essential to emphasize two points: (1) The effective insulating phase is only an apparent insulating phase by virtue of the insulator being defined through the negative temperature derivative of resistivity, i.e. $`d\rho /dT<0`$. This apparent insulating phase is really a metallic (i.e. extended or delocalized electron wavefunction) electron liquid phase (interacting with random charged impurity centers) exhibiting $`d\rho /dT<0`$ down to a crossover temperature scale ($`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) with the lowest temperature ($`TT_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) phase being always a true metal with $`d\rho /dT>0`$. (2) The temperature dependence of $`\rho (T)`$ in this apparently insulating phase simulates a power law (with $`\rho 1/T`$ in the $`T>T_F`$ high-temperature region) rather than the exponential temperature dependence typical of a true insulating phase. The finite temperature crossover “insulating” phase (i.e. $`d\rho /dT<0`$) is, by definition, a “high” temperature phase in our Drude-Boltzmann transport model with the true “low” temperature ($`T0`$) phase in our theory (which manifestly excludes weak and strong localization effects) being always a metallic (i.e. $`d\rho /dT>0`$) phase. The crucial point of physics is, however, the fact that experimentally there is always a low temperature cut-off, $`T_{\mathrm{min}}`$, below which carriers simply cannot be cooled down, and for $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}<T_{\mathrm{min}}`$, the 2D apparent “insulating” phase discussed in this paper would, for all particular purposes, behave like a ’real’ insulating phase. The “apparent” 2D metal-insulator transition in this crossover scenario will therefore appear to occur at the density $`n_c`$ defined by $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n_c)T_{\mathrm{min}}`$.

In comparing our theoretical results with the existing 2D MIT data in the experimental literature, we mention that a large number of reported data look qualitatively similar to the results shown in Figs. 1 - 3 of this paper. In particular, the following features of our theoretical results are often observed experimentally: (1) the low-density-low temperature 2D insulating phase (for $`n<n_c`$) is often seen to have an approximate power law temperature dependence resistivity; (2) the low temperature extrapolated ($`T0`$) resistivity does not seem to be divergent in many cases; (3) the experimentally observed critical density $`n_c`$ has been reported to be a function of the lowest measurement temperature with $`n_c(T)`$ decreasing monotonically with decreasing temperature. For low enough carrier densities, most 2D systems should eventually enter a strongly localized transport regime where the low-temperature resistivity diverges in an exponential manner, but in high quality (i.e. low disorder) systems of interest in the 2D MIT phenomenon such exponentially divergent resistivity seems to be always preceded by a density regime (below $`n_c`$) where $`\rho (T)`$ increases smoothly in a power law manner with decreasing temperature. This intermediate density regime of apparent insulating behavior is most strongly manifested in 2D p-GaAs and n-GaAs systems, but it has also been seen in n-Si MOS systems. A possible reason for the prevalence of the apparent insulating phase in 2D GaAs systems could be the much higher quality (i.e. much lower disorder) for GaAs-based 2D systems compared with 2D Si structure, making it possible for the system not to manifest localization down to rather low carrier densities, thus enabling the crossover insulating phase to show up more easily without being preempted by localization.

In discussing experimental data, it is important to realize that the measured 2D resistivity $`\rho (T)`$ typically shows a saturation at low enough temperature, i.e. below some saturation temperature ($`T_s50300mK`$, depending on the experiment) $`\rho (T<T_s)`$ becomes essentially a constant completely independent of temperature. Although an underlying (unknown) fundamental cause for this resistivity saturation behavior cannot be definitively ruled out, the saturation is generally believed to arise from a saturation in the carrier temperature due to the inevitable carrier heating problems in semiconductors at low temperatures and densities. This possibility of carrier temperature saturation at low temperatures (where further cryogenic cooling only lowers the temperature of the surrounding bath, not the 2D electrons themselves) is further supported by the fact that the resistivity saturation is also seen in the insulating system at low enough carrier temperatures. We have completely ignored the low temperature resistivity saturation problem in our analysis, assuming, perhaps somewhat uncritically, but in agreement with all existing theoretical analyses in the subject, that the resistivity saturation arises from temperature saturation, i.e. $`T_sT_{\mathrm{min}}`$. Within the screening theory, in fact, thermal suppression of screening will be cut off at temperatures ($`T<T_D`$) lower than the temperature scale of the disorder scattering (with $`T_D\mathrm{}/k_B\tau `$), and we have taken this disorder broadening effect approximately into account in the results presented in Figs. 2 and 3 of this paper. Another comment in the context of 2D MIT experiments is the issue of the so-called separatrix, where the critical density $`n_c`$ separating the metallic and the insulating phase is claimed to manifest a completely temperature independent resistivity sharply delineating the metallic phase ($`d\rho /dT>0`$) from the insulating phase ($`d\rho /dT<0`$) and thus defining a quantum phase transition. Such a sharp separatrix cannot be explained at all within our Drude-Boltzmann theory since all electronic states are by definition extended in our semiclassical theory. As has been emphasized above, the apparent critical density $`n_c`$ in our theory is strongly temperature dependent with $`n_c`$ delineating $`d\rho /dT>0`$ (for $`n>n_c`$) and $`d\rho /dT<0`$ (for $`n<n_c`$) decreasing with the lowest measurement temperature $`T_{\mathrm{min}}`$ with $`n_c0`$ as $`T_{\mathrm{min}}0`$ since a true insulator does not exist in our theory. An experimental separatrix defining the 2D MIT has, however, been rarely reported, and in that sense our theory is consistent with a large body of the existing 2D MIT experimental data. We do emphasize, however, that at low enough densities all real 2D systems should eventually exhibit exponential localization behavior (at densities below the “power law” apparent localization being discussed in this paper) which is beyond the scope of our work. We believe that Si MOS systems, typically being more disordered than 2D GaAs systems, exhibit much more of the exponential-type true insulating behavior than the power-law apparent insulating behavior being discussed in this paper.

In a very recent paper Noh et al.  have reported an anomalous power law insulating behavior in a 2D p-GaAs systems at low densities (and intermediate temperature), which we believe to be the apparent insulating phase induced by quantum-classical crossover being predicted in this paper. The $`r_s`$ values in the samples of ref.  are extremely high ($`r_s4480`$), bringing up the possibility of Wigner crystal (perhaps in a strongly correlated molten phase ) physics playing a role in this experiment. We believe that it is unlikely that Wigner crystal (WC) physics has much to do with this anomalous insulating behavior. First, the experimental temperature and density regime where the anomalous insulating behavior is observed is well outside the WC phase boundary (see our Fig. 4 in this paper). Second, the transport data plotted as $`\sigma (T)\rho ^1`$ for various densities in ref.  show absolutely no indication of a critical density separating metallic and insulating phases — the data at all densities look essentially the same at “high temperatures” where $`\sigma (T)T`$ whereas at “low temperatures” the relatively high density conductivity shows an upward bending below some density-dependent temperature $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ (i.e. $`d\rho /dT`$ changes sign from being insulating-like, $`d\rho /dT<0`$, at higher temperatures to being metallic-like, $`d\rho /dT>0`$, at lower temperatures). We emphasize that for $`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ there is absolutely no difference in the observed qualitative behavior of $`\sigma (T)`$ at different densities. Since $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ decreases with carrier density $`n`$, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that the experimental low density $`\sigma (T)`$ plots would actually also bend upward at temperatures lower than the lowest hole temperature ($`60mK`$) achieved in these experiments. In fact the experimental data of Noh et al. are entirely consistent with this scenario. For example, if the experimental temperature cut-off is taken to be $`200mK`$ in the data of Noh et al., then all the plots shown in ref.  would appear to be “insulating” (upto the hole density of $`5\times 10^9cm^2`$) since all the experimental data exhibit $`d\rho /dT<0`$ (i.e. $`d\sigma /dT>0`$) down to 200mK.

To emphasize the similarity between the experimental data of Noh et al. and our predicted crossover apparent insulating phase we show in Fig. 2 our calculated low density transport results for the Noh et al. sample. Remembering that phonon scattering (neglected in our theory) becomes important for GaAs holes already at 500 mK , the results of Fig. 2 are remarkably similar to the experimental data presented in ref. . This is particularly true for Fig. 2(b), where we include a Dingle

temperature cut-off in the screening function in order to approximately simulate the effect of collisional broadening (due to impurity scattering). The basic idea is to include in the finite wave vector static polarizability the level broadening (parametrized by a Dingle temperature $`T_D=\mathrm{\Gamma }/k_B`$ where $`\mathrm{\Gamma }`$ is the collisional damping) arising from the impurity scattering. As discussed earlier in the literature  such a collisional damping term, parametrized by the level broadening parameter $`T_D`$, acts to suppress the thermal effects on screening at low temperatures, $`TT_D`$, while leaving the screening function essentially unaffected at high temperatures $`T>T_D`$. Since the level broadening parameter in the screening, $`T_D`$, is unknown (within our approximation scheme), we do not attach any great quantitative significance to our approximation except to note that this zeroth order scheme of incorporating collisional damping in screening is physically meaningful since impurity scattering should tend to suppress finite wave vector static screening of an electron gas. We emphasize that the parameter $`T_D`$ used in our theory should not be construed to be $`T_D\mathrm{}/k_B\tau `$ (which would be far too small), but should be considered an effective level broadening parameter which cuts off the strong temperature dependence of screening for $`T<T_D`$, with $`T_D`$ being a parameter of the theory (increasing with decreasing conductivity).

It is therefore worth while to emphasize that our results (with $`T_D0`$ in screening) shown in Fig. 2(b) are qualitatively (and even semiquantitatively) in good agreement with the approximately linearly rising, $`\sigma T`$, conductivity at higher temperatures found by Noh et al. In fact, even our $`T_D=0`$ static RPA screening transport results are in qualitative agreement with experiment except for the fact that the crossover temperature $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ for $`d\sigma /dT`$ to change sign is consistently much higher in Fig. 2(a) with $`T_D=0`$ than in our Fig. 2(b) with $`T_D0`$ or in the experiment. The basic behavior of an approximately linear temperature dependence of conductivity, $`\sigma T`$, for $`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ with $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ decreasing with decreasing density (and $`d\sigma /dT<0`$, i.e. $`\sigma (T)`$ increasing with decreasing temperature for $`T<T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$) applies to Figs. 2(a) and (b) and to the experimental data. Inclusion of phonon scattering (neglected in our calculations here) is likely to further improve the good agreement between experiment and theory.

In the context of comparison with the experimental data we show in Fig. 3 our calculated low temperature transport results for the 2D GaAs electron system corresponding to the recent measurement of Lilly et al. carried out in a high quality low density n-GaAs gated heterostructure system. We have kept the level broadening parameter $`T_D=0.75K`$ fixed in the results shown in Fig. 3 and have shown the behavior of both the resistivity $`\rho (T)`$ and conductivity $`\sigma (T)`$ for several low densities. Again, phonon scattering effects, possibly of some importance here for $`T>1K`$ , have been neglected. These theoretical results are again in striking qualitative and semiquantitative agreement with the experimental data of Lilly et al.  demonstrating that the experimentally observed anomalous insulating phase in high-quality (i.e. low-disorder) 2D semiconductor systems may very well be the apparent crossover insulating phase (which would manifest metallic behavior for $`T<T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ except that $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ may be too low to be experimentally accessible at low carrier densities) predicted by our theory.

The striking qualitative agreement between our theory and experiment for the anomalous insulating phase encourages us to predict the following scenario for high quality GaAs-based 2D (both electron and hole) systems. As 2D carrier density is lowered the high temperature crossover insulating phase ($`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$) extends to lower temperatures as $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ goes down, and eventually when $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ goes below the lowest accessible experimental temperature, the system appears to be insulating with an anomalous (i.e. power law) temperature

dependence characterizing the apparent insulating phase. Since our predicted scenario is in excellent qualitative agreement with the available experimental data in GaAs-based high-mobility 2D holes and electrons, we propose the following direct experimental test for its verification (or falsification): One should lower the temperature to check whether the observed anomalous temperature dependence of the putative insulating phase remains insulating or bends upward (i.e. $`d\sigma /dT`$ goes through zero changing its sign from positive to negative as it does at higher densities) at lower temperatures. Since lowering carrier temperature arbitrarily is typically difficult to achieve in 2D semiconductor systems, a relatively easy way of testing our proposed scenario will be to directly plot the experimentally measured $`d\sigma /dT`$ (or $`d\rho /dT`$) as a function of temperature at low densities in the anomalous insulating phase. If the magnitude of this derivative is decreasing with decreasing temperature indicating that $`\sigma `$ (or $`\rho `$) may be approaching a minimum (or maximum), then this is a rather strong verification of our proposed scenario. We mention in this context that the experimental data of ref.  and  are qualitatively consistent with our proposed scenario of a decreasing magnitude of $`d\sigma /dT`$ as $`T`$ decreases. We believe that there are simply two possibilities (which are consistent with our prediction of the anomalous power law insulating phase being a crossover phase): Either the magnitude of $`d\rho /dT`$ will decrease indicating a transition to an effective metallic phase or $`d\rho /dT`$ will diverge exponentially indicating a true insulating phase. We suggest that experiments be carried out in the anomalous power law insulating phase (with careful measurements of $`d\rho /dT`$ as a function of $`T`$ and $`n`$) to verify our prediction.

Finally, we discuss the possibility of WC physics playing a role in the observed anomalous insulating behavior of refs. . In Fig. 4 we show our calculated approximate WC ($`Tn`$) phase diagram for both 2D electrons and holes in GaAs, combining both the $`T=0`$ quantum Wigner crystallization at low carrier densities and the classical Wigner crystallization. The calculation of this approximate WC phase diagram follows our recent work in ref.  where we show how one can implement an interpolation scheme to obtain the full phase diagram in the density-temperature plot by combining the known classical and quantum  WC limits. We also show as shaded regimes the experimental samples corresponding to refs.  and  in Fig. 3(a) and (b) respectively. Both the shaded regions are well outside the WC phase in the phase diagram indicating that WC physics is unlikely to be playing a dominant role here. The more important reason for ruling out the WC scenario is, however, experimental — the experimental data of Noh at al.  is completely smooth and the conductivity behavior in the “metallic” (higher density) and the “insulating” (lower density) phase is identical at higher temperatures, the only difference being the upward curvature in $`\sigma (T)`$ in the higher density data which moves to lower temperatures in the lower density plots and may have simply moved to temperatures below the measurement temperatures at the lowest densities making it experimentally invisible.

In summary, we have identified an apparent “high temperature” insulating phase in 2D systems at intermediate carrier densities where the conductivity increases with temperature in a power law fashion (approximately linearly). This apparent or effective insulating phase is a temperature-induced quantum-classical crossover phase which exists only for $`T>T_{\mathrm{cross}}(n)`$ where $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ decreases with decreasing carrier density. We have shown that, although typically $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}T_F`$ ($`n`$), it is possible for $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ to be substantially below the Fermi temperature if collisional broadening effects are included in the carrier screening function. We have shown that our calculated transport behavior in this effective insulating phase agrees qualitatively very well with recent observations in high-quality 2D electrons and holes in GaAs heterostructures, We have not discussed the 2D Si-MOS system in this paper because the disorder effects in Si MOSFETs are substantially higher (mobilities are typically factors of $`101000`$ lower in Si MOS systems than in GaAs systems), and the Si MOS systems make transitions to the strongly localized phase (with exponential temperature dependence) much sooner — this intermediate crossover insulating phase therefore exists only in a very narrow

range of densities and temperatures in Si MOS systems.

The weakest empirical point in our quantitative comparison with the experimental data is the fact that our theoretically obtained $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}^{th}(n)`$ seems to be consistently higher than the experimental crossover temperature $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}^{ex}(n)`$ where $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ at a particular density could for example be defined by the condition $`d\sigma /dT=0`$ at $`T=T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$. We have tentatively fixed this problem in this work by introducing the collisional damping induced screening cut-off through the Dingle temperature parameter $`T_D`$. The other possibility is to take the real Fermi temperature $`T_F`$ to be smaller than the nominal $`T_F`$ ($`n/m`$) given by the carrier density $`n`$ and the band effective mass $`m`$ which could happen if the actual effective mass is larger than the band mass and/or the actual free carrier density is smaller (e.g. due to trapping of carriers). While in the GaAs-based high mobility systems studied in this paper, the discrepancy between $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}^{th}(n)`$ and $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}^{ex}(n)`$ is relatively small even for the $`T_D=0`$ theory, this discrepancy is very large in Si MOS based 2D systems where disorder is high. A straightforward application of our $`T_D=0`$ theory for Si MOS systems indicates $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}>1K`$ for the $`n=5\times 10^{10}10^{11}cm^2`$ density range of relevance to Si 2D systems. To reduce $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ substantially one needs to introduce large values of $`T_D`$ where the theory is not meaningful. The other possibility is that the effective mass in Si may be enhanced from its band value and/or the effective carrier density may be substantially lower than the nominal $`n`$. It is therefore interesting to note that there is no clear cut signature of this anomalous insulating phase in 2D Si MOS systems where the insulating phase, for $`T<1K`$ or so, indicates exponentially rising resistivity with decreasing temperature. This is consistent with our finding of rather large $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}^{th}`$ in Si MOS systems implying that this apparent insulating phase in Si systems remains only a high temperature phase since the electrons can always be cooled below $`T_{\mathrm{cross}}`$ in the 2D Si samples.

We note finally that the validity of the semiclassical Drude-Boltzmann theory for studying the anomalous insulating phase is not a crucial issue in this context. The reason is that Boltzmann theory, being semiclassical, becomes increasingly valid at higher temperatures, and therefore, should be a reasonable qualitative description for the “high-temperature” effective insulating phase being discussed here. The precise value of the resistivity $`\rho `$ and the corresponding localization parameter $`k_Fl`$ (where $`l`$ is the transport mean-free path), i.e. whether $`\rho `$ is smaller than the quantum of resistance $`h/e^2`$ or $`k_Fl`$ is larger than unity, are important issues for $`T=0`$ considerations (where quantum localization effects are important) but not for finite $`T/T_F`$ ($`0.11`$) case which is of interest here. In fact, within our semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory the behavior shown in Figs. 1 - 3 are generic behavior determined entirely by $`n`$ and $`T`$, completely independent of the actual resistivity values of the 2D system, i.e. one should think of the ordinate ($`\rho `$ or $`\sigma `$ in our figures) to have completely arbitrary units — the actual values of $`\rho `$ ($`=\sigma ^1`$) in our theoretical results being determined by the unknown charged impurity density ($`N_i`$) in the system which we use as an adjustable parameter to set the resistivity scale. It is more appropriate to think of ordinate at Figs. 1 and 2 as $`\rho /\rho _0`$ or $`\sigma /\sigma _0`$ where $`\rho _0`$ or $`\sigma _0`$ are the $`T=0`$ Drude values of resistivity or conductivity. These considerations make it clear that our qualitative results are valid (at finite $`T/T_F`$) irrespective of the actual sample resistivities as long as one can neglect quantum localization effects which seems to be the case for the GaAs experiments in refs.  and , but perhaps not for Si MOS samples.

In our conclusion we discuss critically the approximations of our theory which may limit its applicability to real 2D systems. Our most important approximations are the Drude-Boltzmann scattering theory (due to charged impurity scattering) and RPA screening by the electron liquid. Both of these approximations are simplistic at the low carrier density phenomena of interest here. But there are good reasons to believe that our theory is sound in explaining the qualitative behavior of 2D semiconductor systems at densities and temperatures above the true localization regime. First, recent systematic diagrammatic calculations  of higher order interaction corrections to the 2D resistivity show that the basic picture of an effective 2D metallic behavior with $`d\rho /dT>0`$ (with a leading order linear temperature coefficient of resistivity) applies well in the ballistic transport regime ($`\mathrm{}/k_B\tau TT_F`$) provided weak localization effects are negligible. Second, the results for $`\rho (T,n)`$ obtained in the 2D metallic regime within the RPA-Drude-Boltzmann theory agree well with existing experimental results. Third, RPA becomes quantitatively accurate at high temperatures (and, our inclusion of local field correlation corrections going beyond RPA give qualitatively very similar results). We therefore believe that our description of the high-temperature apparent insulating phase based on the semi-classical Drude-Boltzmann-RPA transport theory may have considerable theoretical validity.

We would like to thank M. P. Lilly for helpful discussions. This work is supported by the US-ONR and NSF-ECS.


format: text

text:
# A Proposal to Separate Handles from Names on the Internet

## 1 The Value of Names Leads to Conflict

The success of the Internet has made it valuable, and that value has naturally led to conflict between contenders for the profits. Many parts of the Internet design have avoided such conflict by providing a sufficient supply of valuable resources, and by economic network effects that make one party’s holdings even more valuable when others gain similar holdings. The assignment of high-level names in the Domain Name System (DNS) stands out for the substantial and increasing contention for scarce resources. There is some controversy over the extent to which this scarcity should be cured by introduction of a large number of top-level domains (TLDs). But to some substantial degree the conflict derives from the natural scarcity of human memory and attention, which often causes the opposite of a network effect—other uses of my name can diminish the valuable distinction of having that name refer to me.

Dispute over valuable names precedes the Internet, and led to legal regulation of trade marks names. The sudden success of the Internet threw a monkey wrench into that regulation by changing and blurring the boundaries between the different contexts in which a name is used.

Long before highways were super, much less informational, Cyrus Avery recognized the importance of naming when he promoted the development of Route 66 through his hometown of Tulsa Oklahoma. Even after the Road Designation Committee had agreed to construct pavement connecting Chicago, Tulsa, and Los Angeles, Avery fought to have that route given a single name, and the highly mnemonic name of Route 60. He settled for 66, which was at least more mnemonic than 64 or 68. This naming coup established the notion that people would travel from Chicago to Los Angeles through Tulsa, enticed song-writers and television producers to advertise that notion for free, and brought lots of tourist money to Oklahoma that would otherwise have landed elsewhere . The conflict over Internet domain names is the natural successor to the conflict over road names, and it will not be completely resolved as long as domain names have an impact on commercially valuable behavior.

While a certain amount of conflict over name space is probably unavoidable, we should remove as much of the value of the Internet as we can from the scope of that conflict. Domain names in the current DNS conflate two different sorts of utility:

* they serve as permanent *handles*, referring to a particular agent as its address changes due to mobility or to changes in network topology;
* they serve as mnemonic and guessable *names*, establishing a connection between humanly meaningful concepts and network agents.

Meaningless handles are plentiful, and can be provided promiscuously without suffering a reverse network effect. Names carry a very substantial structure of meaning, which adds to their value, but also makes them much more problematic and in particular attracts conflict.

So, we should separate these two sorts of utility, and support each one as well as possible independently of the other. With such independence, conflict over handles should be insignificantly small. Conflict over names will continue, but the greater flexibility allowed by independent use of handles and names may allow more effective management of names as well. If domain names cease to be the only available network handles, they may compete more sensibly with other semantic organization of the Internet, such as *Yahoo* and *Google*. Bob Frankston wrote a very useful analysis of the way in which conflict over names leads to violations of their use as handles, and the need for a “Safe Haven” for handles .

Although I am only proposing to separate handles from names, I need to discuss the other two sorts of network reference tokens—*routes* and *addresses*—and the parties that use them.

## 2 Parties to Network Operations

I derive the need for the four different sorts of tokens that may be used in a network—*routes*, *addresses*, *handles*, and *names*—from the need to accommodate a number of different sorts of parties to network operations, each one assigned different authority and responsibility, and each one feeling different incentives. I derive my list of parties intuitively from my observations of the global Internet. A different list of parties might demand a different design.

In this article, an *agent* is any entity in which we care to invest authority. That includes human beings, offices performed by human beings, corporations, departments within corporations, groups of human beings acting somewhat co-operatively, computer programs, and lots of other possibilities. A document may be thought of as a relatively passive agent, or the curator of a document may be treated as a different agent when acting as curator than when performing other roles.

Parties in network operations include:

Agents that read information in a message somehow indicating the desired recipient, and direct the message in order to reach that recipient. Today, the word “router” often refers to a particular sort of network hardware designed especially to serve as a router. But all “hosts” in Internet terminology are also routers. For the purpose of my conceptual overview, a router may also be a particular piece of software running on a computer host, or any other identifiable agent that participates in routing. A network system normally includes a large number of routers.

The unique collective agent that determines the rules by which a network system operates. Network administration is normally a loose organization comprising a variety of computers, individuals, and participating organizations with different detailed incentives. But to the extent that they all co-operate in the interest of effective network operation, I regard them as constituting a single collective agent.

All agents that send and receive messages across the network.

Loosely co-operating groups of people.

A particular agent may participate in the network in more than one of the roles above, or as a member of a larger agent, but I derive my observations about reference tokens from the separate actions of agents in their different roles. Notice again that there are lots of routers, lots of members, and lots of communities, each constituting an individual agent. There is only one network administration, although it is a large collective agent.

## 3 Routes, Addresses, Handles, and Names

I will define these four types of tokens in terms of the operations that we can perform on them. But you might notice that in most cases we can translate between the four types of tokens, so mathematically whatever we can do to one we can do to the others. The real differences lie in which operations must be very efficient, and in who has the authority to determine the translations. Translation from names to handles to addresses to routes is called *resolution*.

A token associated with a message directing routers how to deliver that message.

A token associated with a particular target location in a network. At any location in the network (not just the target location), an address should resolve to a route leading to the target location.

A token associated with an agent participating in a network. A handle should resolve to an address at which we may communicate with that agent.

A token carrying some humanly understandable meaning. A name should resolve to the handle corresponding to its humanly understandable meaning.

I use the word “should” advisedly in these definitions. A network system is intended to support the resolution of names to handles to addresses to routes in a fashion that satisfies all of the “should”s. But the requirements for resolution of names is inherently subjective, so the resolution cannot be perfectly reliable. As we go down the list from names toward routes, the objective quality and reliability of resolution improves, but it never becomes perfect. The success of the global Internet depends critically on our willingness to work with protocols that *should* produce a particular result, but that fail occasionally. We have found that it is better in many cases to guard against the consequences of occasional failures than to try to prevent them.

In this article, I am trying to show the value of including all four levels of reference, and all three resolution steps, in the design of a network. But many network designs reduce the number of levels to three, two, or even one by omitting levels and/or conflating adjacent levels. I am not aware of any network design in serious use today that includes all four levels and keeps them clearly separate. When a level is missing, resolution just skips over that level to the next lower one (nearer to routes) that is included in the design.

By composing the different resolution steps, all network reference tokens resolve down to routes. In many cases, we can also run resolution backwards (e.g., the current *whois* service maps IP addresses back to domain names that resolve to them). The relative ease with which each type of token may be mapped to each other type makes it hard to keep track of the differences. Whenever the support for a particular type of token is missing, we tend to use another type of token to approximate it. For example, the English phrase “Editor of the *Journal of Irreproducible Results*” is a *name* that also works pretty well outside of the network as a *handle*, referring continuously to the abstract agent who edits *JIR* no matter how that role passes from person to person and how the people playing the role move from one address to another. But I regard such a phrase as essentially a name, since its resolution is mediated by natural human language, and subject to changes in that language.

In the definitions above, I differentiated addresses, handles, and names according to the different objects that they should refer to consistently, even while the routes change. An address should always refer to the same location, a handle to the same agent, and a name to the same humanly understandable meaning. The meaning of a name is clearly subjective, but in fact the notions of location and agent are also fuzzy. Instead of refining the definitions of location and agent, which I am pretty sure can never be made satisfactorily objective, I will distinguish addresses, handles, and names according to where we invest the authority for their resolutions. In effect, this means that a network *location* is whatever address resolution defines it to be, a network *agent* is whatever handle resolution defines it to be, and *meaning* is whatever natural language defines it to be.

Network administration has authority over all resolutions of addresses to routes. In practice, the network administration as a whole usually delegates some of this authority to smaller agents participating in the network administration.

Each member of the network may become owner of one or more handles. The owner of a handle has authority over all resolutions of that handle to an address. Network administration may have authority to assign handles to owners.

Human communities have collective authority over the resolution of names to handles.

The intention in the assignment of authority above is to make the authority over a resource, the responsibility for acceptable use of that resource, and the incentive to derive value from the resource, coincide as much as possible. If I have identified the types of parties well, and matched the resources to them well, then these authorities, responsibilities, and incentives will coincide well.

To understand the relations between the three types of resolution, consider the ways in which each type of resolution can vary. All three vary over time, to deal with mobility on the network, changes in jargon, etc. But at a given time, they vary differently according to context within and without the network.

Resolution varies according to starting location in the network, so that the ending location is constant.

Resolution does not vary except over time.

Resolution varies according to linguistic context, local differences in language and culture, and anything that affects the way people think.

Roughly, address$``$route resolution varies within the network, handle$``$address resolution doesn’t vary at all, and name$``$handle resolution varies outside the network.

## 4 The System of Parties and Reference Tokens

The considerations above suggest a system of parties and reference tokens with the structure shown in Figure 1.

* The items in blue rounded rectangular boxes on the top row represent the three types of parties with authority over resolution—a single network administration, any number of individual network members, and any number of overlapping human communities. These parties are abstract agents who participate in the network, but the network design doesn’t define them precisely and formally.
* The items in black square boxes in the middle row represent the four types of reference tokens. These types of tokens must be given explicitly and formally in the network design.
* The items in gold ovals in the bottom row represent the types of mental concepts that the four types of reference tokens are intended to capture. The act of message delivery in the network is rather precisely defined, but moving from left to right, the concepts become less objective and more ambiguous, as suggested by the fuzzier sorts of boundaries.
* The red lines from the top to the middle row represent the authority of the three types of parties to control the three types of resolution. The multiple connections from individual members to arrows from handles to addresses indicate that each handle owner has separate authority over her handle(s). The squiggly red lines from communities to the name$``$handle resolution suggest the complexity of their collective exercise of authority.
* The black right-left arrows in the middle row represent the three types of resolution. These methods of resolution are implemented through some sort of tables in various network hosts and routers.
* The gold left-right arrows in the bottom row represent the conceptual connections that allow each of these concepts to determine one to its right. Each delivery leads to a particular location. Each location contains a particular agent. Each agent is responsible for data or services with a particular human meaning.
* The green up-down arrows between the middle and bottom rows represent the intended associations of deliveries with routes, locations with addresses, agents with handles, and meanings with names. The association of routes with deliveries is determined precisely and formally by the network operations. From left to right, the associations become less objective and more ambiguous, as suggested by the fuzzier sorts of arrows.

The design and implementation of a system of network reference tokens is intended to make all of the different paths from formal network tokens (black) to mental concepts (gold) connect the same individual items. In particular, when we resolve a particular handle into an address and then into a route, then use that route to deliver a message to a location, the agent receiving the message at that location is intended to be the one associated conceptually with the given handle. As network architects and engineers, we can only control the mechanisms for the black arrows. A design and implementation are successful if they make the black resolution arrows work in such a way that it is possible (with high reliability, but not absolute perfection) to think up sensible conceptual interpretations of the green and gold arrows that make these different connections equivalent.

Notice that there is no fixed definitional foundation in the diagram. The behavior of the network, as determined by the formal settings of resolutions in the middle row (black), influences the way that we think about the concepts in the bottom row (gold). The success of the system is determined by the utility of its entire behavior, not by the agreement of one part of the diagram with a completely predetermined structure in another.

There are a lot of details involved in making such a system of names, handles, addresses, and routes work efficiently. For example, although each party should keep a table of the resolutions directly under its authority, and that table should be the final resort to resolve tokens correctly, all sorts of routers and other agents should keep local tables, called *caches*, of the resolutions that they are using regularly, to save the traffic and the delay associated with sending to the authoritative source for each resolution. Furthermore, local caches don’t necessarily correspond directly to address$``$route, handle$``$address, and name$``$handle resolution. If a particular agent is concerned with the correspondence between names and addresses, it should cache a table of the direct resolution of names to addresses, derived by composing the name$``$handle and handle$``$address resolutions. With this sort of transitive caching, the cost of multilevel resolution is not much more than one-level resolution.

### 4.1 Routes, Addresses, and Handlenames in the Current Internet

#### Routes.

In the current Internet, routes do not need to be written down in one place. address$``$route resolution interleaves with the execution of a delivery, so that the route is implicit in the path by which a message is forwarded. The relationship between IP addresses and routes is a bit more complicated than this article suggests, since several different routes to the same address may be used at the same time, and messages may be broken up en route and reassembled at the end.

#### Addresses.

The IP routing protocol is described in a form that uses IP numbers as addresses. IP numbers are just 32-bit numbers. But IP numbers are not the only sorts of addresses used in the Internet. The UDP protocol uses the combination of an IP number and a port number as an extended address. IP numbers essentially allow a message to be addressed to an entire computer, called a *host* (although for technical reasons IP numbers actually refer to network interfaces). UDP addresses allow a message to be addressed to a particular *application* running on a particular host, such as a particular sort of server, or a mail recipient. Other protocols have other notions of address—the HTTP protocol supporting the World Wide Web uses URLs as addresses. A URL essentially addresses a particular file on a particular host.

Networking efficiency sometimes requires addresses of *distributed locations* for servers requiring the resources of several hosts. For example multihosted Web servers share the messages to a particular address among several different hosts. As far as I know, most addresses for distributed locations on the current Internet are simulated implicitly through some tricks with routing tables (IPv6  has addresses for multicast and anycast distributed locations). Mobility and intermittent connection call for time-dependent addresses. For the future, we should open our minds to the possibility that any sort of instructions for contacting a particular agent may be thought of as an address.

#### Handlenames.

The Domain Name System  (DNS) provides tokens that were mainly designed to serve as handles. But domain names are usually chosen to be mnemonically valuable sequences of characters, so they also serve as names. The high value of the names creates conflicts that degrade the value as handles.

## 5 A Pseudohistory of Network Reference

One way to understand the value of the four layers of reference to the effective use of a network is to consider a partly fictional, but realistic, history of network development as it might have happened.

#### First came routes.

A network cannot deliver messages without routes. The UUCP system directed all messages by routes of the form host1!host2!hostn, describing the entire sequence of “hosts” (acting as routers in my terminology) on the route. Each host/router kept its own table of hosts/routers with which it communicated directly. System administration required little more than agreeing on the general format for describing routes—all operational routing details could be handled independently by hosts/routers.

Routes allowed great support for distributed routing, but they were not portable. If Sally at the host gargoyle discovered the route to a great online candy store run by Grampa, and wished to share it with her friend Paul at foghorn, she could not merely send the route token to Paul—someone had to translate the route. The only general and reliable way for Sally and Paul to translate the route was to append the route between foghorn and gargoyle, which they must have known in order to communicate. This led to nasty long routes with inefficient forwarding. Even if Sally were selfish, and kept the candy supply to herself, she had to translate the route when she moved from gargoyle to juniper. Worse, selfish Sally could rest immobile at gargoyle and still find that a change in network topology invalidated her treasured route to Grampa’s candy.

#### Addresses provide independence of starting point and topology.

In small local networks, with all participants connected rigidly and directly, routes are pretty much indistinguishable from addresses. The design of IP for ARPANet and the Internet made useful sense of globally meaningful addresses in a dynamically changing network with many different sorts of hops between particular communicating hosts. Addresses in IP were just 32-bit numbers, but they were usually written in the form n1.n2.n3.n4, where n1, n2, n3, n4 are 8-bit numbers written in base $`10`$.

Network administration had authority to assign these numbers, but it could delegate the authority to assign numbers within a subrange. Each host/router kept track of its own address, the addresses of hosts/routers with which it communicated directly, and the direction in which to forward a message with each possible address. Since $`2^{32}=`$4,294,967,296 was somewhat too large to allow each host/router to store a table with a separate entry for each possible address, routing tables held entries forwarding all addresses in some numerical range in the same direction, and providing a default direction for addresses not in the table.

IP routing provided global addresses, whose meanings would not change according to the location from which they are used. This allowed Sally to keep track of Grampa’s candy store, and share it with Paul at will. It takes some thought to make sure that the routing could work efficiently, but real history shows that it did.

IP routing never required anyone to resolve an address into an explicitly written token presenting the route. Routes were implicit in the joint distributed actions of all of the hosts/routers. In effect, the resolution of an address to a route was interleaved with delivery according to the route. But routes were still there. Those who really wanted to write them down could generally get them from the traceroute program.

With IP addresses to pass around, Sally, Paul, and Grampa were all quite happy, until the candy store’s address changed. The address changed once because Grampa moved his server from space rented on a shared computer to his own computer, once because he moved the store to another state with lower business taxes, and several other times because network topology changed. Even though IP numerical addresses were not tied rigidly to routes, they had to be assigned so that the routing tables could keep information efficiently in terms of a small number of numerical subranges, forwarding all addresses within such a subrange in the same direction. Both the candy store’s own mobility, and the requirement to maintain efficient routing through a change in network topology, prevented Grampa’s initial IP address from sticking reliably to the candy store.

#### DNS provided handlenames.

The designers of the Internet realized very early that effective use of the network required the ability to refer permanently and reliably to an agent whose address might change. So, they invented *domain names* of the form bottomdomain.subdomain.topdomain to serve as permanent handles. Network administration had authority to assign domain names, but it could delegate that authority hierarchically even more flexibly than the authority over IP addresses. Network administration maintained tables translating domains to addresses. But only the translation of top-level domains (edu, com, org, etc.), which appear at the right-hand end of complete domain names, needed to be available globally. Each top-level domain name could resolve to the address of a server keeping tables for that domain only, and so on down the hierarchy. Furthermore, each individual host could maintain its own local cache of recently or frequently used domain name translations, avoiding repeated appeal to the authoritative name servers.

With domain names, Grampa could acquire ydnac.com (to avoid collision with reality, a certain word is written backwards), and subdivide the business into chocolate.ydnac.com, halvah.ydnac.com, etc. at will. Sally could keep track of ydnac.com, and perhaps her favorite subdomains, use these domain names from any host on the network, communicate them to Paul at will. Furthermore, whenever his own mobility, or a change in network topology, caused the address of the candy store to change, Grampa could merely update the entry for ydnac.com in the appropriate authoritative table, and let it spread around to all of the local caches.

In the story so far, domain names have served as handles, providing permanent reference to an agent through changes of address. But Grampa, and all of his actual and potential customers, got a big bonus as well. The domain name ydnac.com served as a humanly-meaningful name. Sally and Paul found ydnac.com fairly easy to remember, type in their emails to one another, spell out over the telephone, and even to guess at before they knew of the candy store or whenever they lost their record of its name. Even had it been permanent, a numerical IP address would not have been so convenient.

#### Conflict about names destroys handles.

Unfortunately, the very knowledge of the humanly-meaningful semantics associated with ydnac.com, giving it value as a name, became incompatible with its function as a handle. A number of larger and more powerful candy companies, as well as the multinational corporation *C and Y*, all claimed rights to ydnac.com, and it was taken away from Grampa. The bonus value of ydnac.com as a name led to administrative action violating its use as a handle .

It is tempting to blame those nasty big companies for stomping on Grampa, but in fact, humanly meaningful names are inherently subject to forces beyond the authority of an individual handle owner. Human meaning, by definition, is determined by human communities. An individual may determine the human meaning of a name among a circle of friends who accept his influence. But it is fundamentally infeasible to keep human meaning in line with the arbitrary exercise of authority that we would like to invest in the owner of a handle. No matter how cleverly we assign names to start with, some change in society will ruin the scheme.

We can invest a lot of effort into improving the fairness with which conflict over domain names is resolved, and supply more and more domain names to trade off mnemonic quality against cost. But Grampa’s ownership of ydnac.com is inherently a lucky and unsustainable windfall, which we cannot provide to everybody who wants it. Whatever contest we set up, only the winner of that contest may have it.

#### Separate handles from names.

At this point, our story ceases to be history and becomes planning. If we cannot avoid conflict over network names, perhaps we can at least provide conflict-free permanent handles. By locating a system of handles without human meaning at a level of abstraction between names and addresses, we can provide Sally, Paul, and other lovers of grandfatherly candy with a permanent token by which they may reach Grampa as long as he cares to respond to it. We can’t help Grampa and his customers hold on to the wonderful mnemonic value of ydnac.com, but they can’t keep that anyway, and it’s better to keep the handle than to fight a losing battle for the name and keep nothing. ydnac.com is inherently one of a very small number of short memorable names that naturally suggest online acquisition of sweets to all English-speaking Internet users, and we can’t give everyone with an interest in candy full authority over it—we should expect it to go to the strongest contender.

Without ydnac.com, how will Grampa attract attention to his business? The same way he always did before his unsustainable domain-name windfall. Although Grampa’s candy handle is opaque and unmemorable, friends and satisfied customers will pass copies of it around, using Web browsers and other software that will cater to users’ needs to keep track of unmemorable handles. In a pinch, they will read it off to one another as, say, a 16-digit hexadecimal number (similar to a 16-digit credit card number). The handle will appear behind the scenes in pointers, such as the links in Web pages and their technical successors. People will keep personal directories that resolve “My favorite candy store” to Grampa’s candy handle. Grampa will advertise in venues that match his natural clientele and advertising budget, and those venues will associate his handle *locally* with humanly meaningful words, pictures, and other tokens, since he can’t afford to acquire and defend a global association. Aggressive indexing services, such as the current *Yahoo* and *Google*, will organize Grampa’s candy handle into their own presentations of the informational structure of the Web and its technical successors. And, as long as global domain names last, Grampa can still choose to fight for ydnac.com, or make a strategic retreat to grampasydnac.com, or fall back further to grampasydnaconmainstreetintinytownusaearthsolarsystem.com, or …. But I think that, in the long run, he will get more satisfaction from the alternatives.

## 6 Implementing Handles as Domain Names

Since DNS was designed largely to support network handles, no large software development or deployment is required to support an open network handle system. We merely need a nice sponsor to provide a handle domain within the current system of domain names, such as handleroot.nicesponsor.org, and provide random-looking numerical handles promiscuously to all who ask for them. For example, if we choose to present handles in base 16, a typical handle might look like h0061A38F9A3540B9. This handle may be implemented under DNS as h0061A38F9A3540B9.handleroot.nicesponsor.org. There is no particular need for the root of the handle system to be a top-level domain in DNS. Handle owners may define subdomains below their handles with complete freedom, as domain owners do today.

The main administrative burden on the sponsor of an open network handle system is the authentication of updates to the handle$``$address resolution tables. Because an individual handle has almost no intrinsic value beyond that created by the owner at the assigned address, there is no need to identify handle owners reliably with a person or institution in the real world. It is only important to minimize accidental and malicious capture of handles after they are assigned and used. To avoid being a party to disputes, the sponsor should minimize its contact with handle owners.

The precise design of the authentication mechanism should be allowed to vary. The sponsor may offer handle owners some choice to trade off authentication overhead against security, depending on owners’ resources and the value of a particular handle. So, in general a handle might look like h\<t\>\<p1\>...\<pn\>, where \<t\> indicates the type of authentication used for handle updates, and \<p1\>...\<pn\> are parameters of that method, including the unique handle key.

A complete design of ONHS will allow a user to

* create a new handle;
* (re)assign an address temporarily to a handle;
* delegate a handle temporarily to another handle, possibly with a different owner;
* cancel a handle irrevocably;
* transfer a handle irrevocably to another handle, usually with a different authentication key;
* mark a handle’s security irrevocably as compromised.

Typical scenarios using these operations to support creation of handle hierarchies, conversion to new authentication methods, and transfer of handles connected with sale of a business, are treated in .

## 7 Self-Assigned Cryptographic Handles

In order to ease the sponsor’s administrative burden and potential liability as much as possible, ONHS should ideally allow completely independent self-assignment of handles. Such self-assignment is feasible in principle, using public-key cryptographic signatures. Any user may create a public/private key pair, and assign herself a handle of the form h1g5k\<key\>, where “h” just reminds us that this is a handle (and satisfies DNS’ requirement to start with an alphabetic character), “1” indicates a public-key handle, “g” introduces a code for the encryption algorithm, “5” is the IANA standard number  for the RSA/SHA1 signature algorithm. Finally, \<key\> is some number of hexadecimal digits from the end of the SHA1  hash of an RSA  public key. 16 digits will probably provide plenty of assurance against accidental or malicious collision of handles. We may allow individual handle owners to choose the tradeoff between length and security. Ignoring the fact that I haven’t used an actual RSA/SHA1 key, the whole embedding of a self-assigned handle in DNS might look like h1g5k0061A38F9A3540B9.handleroot.nicesponsor.org.

The security extensions to DNS (DNSSEC)  already implement almost all of the functions required to support self-assigned keys based on RSA/SHA1 .

In a system of self-assigned handles, there is no need to invest any authority over resolution in the operator of a name server. A user who queries a handle may authenticate the handle with the owner at the resolvent address. Since the identity of the public key is embedded in the handle itself, as long as the particular key and signature algorithm are not compromised, no intermediary can defraud a conscientious querier. The operator of a name server becomes a mere facilitator of the contact between querier and handle owner, with all responsibility for the authenticity of the contact left to the parties most concerned. The system provides a lot of flexibility for individual handle owners and queriers to contract with operators to provide a defined level of service, without affecting authenticity of communications.  describes potential attacks on a self-assigned ONHS in more detail.

### 7.1 Digression on Public-Key Cryptography

The embedding of (hash keys for) public cryptographic keys has occurred to a number of people. The *Open Privacy Initiative* uses it to create *nyms* as the basis for the accumulation of reputations . Carl M. Ellison mentioned the use of hashed public keys as self-assigned identifiers . Ronald Rivest and Butler Lampson use the same basic idea in their Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure project . Daniel J. Bernstein pointed out the value of hostnames that match public keys . Scott Nelson explained the present application to ONHS in a private communication.

The development of the idea of signatures as objects is well worth considering as a tangent. At first, public-key cryptography appears to solve the digital signature problem. On reflection, we see that it reduces the digital signature problem to the key management problem. The secret key appears to be the harder one to manage. But it only needs to be kept by its owner, who has a substantial incentive to guard it well, and who may limit the number of secret keys that she manages. Management of public keys is often the bigger problem. Each key must be published, and somehow the user of the key must be assured of the connection between that key and a particular agent. The dominant idea to establish that connection is a *chain of trust* in which we all store public keys for a small number of globally trusted agents, who sign certificates of subagents, who sign certificates of more subagents, and so on. Such a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the establishment of satisfactory roots is already very difficult.

I know of no simple solution to the problem of secret-key management. But we may finesse much of the problem of public-key management by letting keys themselves be identities. In effect, public-key handles, nyms, and similar objects do not try to solve the problem of identification on the network. Rather, they serve as tools for constructing identities on the network. They link together all of our transactions with those identities in a reasonably reliable way, and allow us to develop a sense of confidence (or lack of it) from a sequence of transactions. We may use contacts outside of the network, and network communications with agents whom we already know and trust, to increase our confidence in the owner of a particular handle. But the handle itself does not provide any authentic identification deeper than “the owner of this handle.”

So, we may characterize the value of ONHS with a slogan: it provides continuity, not authenticity. Mere continuity appears to have modest value, but when available cheaply and reliably it may be the foundation on which we construct more valuable qualities, such as authenticity.

## 8 Call to Action

Problems with robust reference to resources on the Internet are widely recognized. They are currently being addressed by a variety of ambitious and potentially valuable projects, including the development of governance systems for DNS by ICANN, Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic Web , and the INET working groups on Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)  and Uniform Resource Names (URN) . All of these projects are wrestling directly with human meaning in some form, and all have the potential to add a lot of value to network operations. But all of them are dealing with unsolved problems that preclude immediate wide deployment.

The Permanent URL (PURL) service of OCLC  offers free handles in the URL name space, providing an immediate useful solution to the problem of permanent reference to documents and services that wander around the Web. They are assigning meaningful names on a first-come-first-served basis, which exposes them to the same sorts of dispute that plague DNS if their success attracts the wrong sort of attention. And the service only applies to URL addresses.

The time is ripe for an open network handle system, operating as a domain within DNS, to offer meaningless numerical handles freely and promiscuously to all who ask. Handles that resolve to IP numbers provide a particularly strategic level of service at the foundation of Internet addressing. Future expansion to higher-level addresses, including UDP addresses, URLs, and more, is valuable, but should not delay the implementation of resolution to IP numbers.

The cost of operating the name server will be comparable to the cost of operating a single DNS root server. If the service is successful, there will be a sufficient incentive for the community to provide additional servers to share the load.

If the quality of implementations of DNSSEC is deemed sufficient, the ONHS should support RSA/SHA1 self-assigned handles. For users who are not ready to deal with private-key management, there should be a password-authenticated procsy service to generate and hold private keys. It is also possible to provide a service assigning random handles with only password authentication. This should be the fall-back if DNSSEC implementation is not sufficiently advanced, but the sponsor of ONHS service should encourage migration to owner-managed keys as soon as possible, to avoid legal responsibility for keys.