Shamil Erkenov was a member of the Gross group at WMI as a Ph.D. student between 2021 and 2025.

Ph.D. Thesis: Charge Carrier Properties and Electronic Correlations in the Organic Metals κ-(BEDT-TTF)₂X Near the Mott Metal-Insulator Transition  (2025)

In his Ph.D. thesis, Shamil Erkenov was studying the Mott metal-insulator-transition (MIT) in organic metals by measuring semi-classical and quantum oscillations of the electrical conductivity (Shubnikov-de Haas effect). His highly systematic work has contributed significantly to clarifying the role of various external control parameters (including external pressure, chemical substitution, structural modification) on internal material parameters (including correlation strength, frustration, disorder) and thus on the nature of the electronic ground state of quasi-two-dimensional metals both near and far from the Mott MIT. In particular, he was able to specifically investigate the influence of disorder and was able to show that the correlation-driven Mott MIT can transition into a disorder-driven Mott-Anderson MIT with increasing disorder.