Elemental tellurium is a small band-gap semiconductor, which is always p-doped due to the natural occurrence of vacancies. Its chiral non-centrosymmetric structure, characterized by helical chains arranged in a triangular lattice, and the presence of a spin-polarized Fermi surface, render tellurium a promising candidate for future applications. Here, we use a theoretical framework, appropriate for describing the corrections to conductivity from quantum interference effects, to show that a high-quality tellurium single crystal undergoes a quantum phase transition at low temperatures from an Anderson insulator to a correlated disordered metal at around 17 kbar. Such insulator-to-metal transition manifests itself in all measured physical quantities and their critical exponents are consistent with a scenario in which a pressure-induced Lifshitz transition shifts the Fermi level below the mobility edge, paving the way for a genuine Anderson-Mott transition. We conclude that previously puzzling quantum oscillation and transport measurements might be explained by a possible Anderson-Mott ground state and the observed phase transition.

碲元素是一种带隙小的半导体，由于空位的自然发生，它总是被p掺杂。它的手性非中心对称结构的特征是螺旋链排列成三角形晶格，并且存在自旋极化的费米表面，使碲成为未来应用的有希望的候选者。在这里，我们使用一个理论框架，适用于描述量子干扰效应对电导率的修正，以表明高质量的碲单晶在低温下经历了从安德森绝缘体到相关无序金属的量子相变，温度约为17 kbar。这种绝缘体到金属的过渡在所有测得的物理量中都表现出来，并且其临界指数与压力引起的李夫希兹过渡将费米能级移动到迁移率边缘以下的情况一致，为真正的安德森-莫特过渡铺平了道路。我们得出结论，以前令人费解的量子振荡和传输测量可能由可能的安德森-莫特基态和观察到的相变来解释。