  Localisation phenomena in highly disordered metals close to the extreme
conditions determined by the Mott-Ioffe-Regel (MIR) limit when the electron
mean free path is approximately equal to the interatomic distance is a
challenging problem. Here, to shed light on these localisation phenomena, we
studied the dc transport and optical conductivity properties of nanoscaled
multilayered films composed of disordered metallic Ta and magnetic FeNi
nanoisland layers, where ferromagnetic FeNi nanoislands have giant magnetic
moments of 10^3-10^5 Bohr magnetons (\mu_B). In these multilayered structures,
FeNi nanoisland giant magnetic moments are interacting due to the indirect
exchange forces acting via the Ta electron subsystem. We discovered that the
localisation phenomena in the disordered Ta layer lead to a decrease in the
Drude contribution of free charge carriers and the appearance of the low-energy
electronic excitations in the 1-2 eV spectral range characteristic of
electronic correlations, which may accompany the formation of electronic
inhomogeneities. From the consistent results of the dc transport and optical
studies we found that with an increase in the FeNi layer thickness across the
percolation threshold evolution from the superferromagnetic to ferromagnetic
behaviour within the FeNi layer leads to the delocalisation of Ta electrons
from the associated localised electronic states. On the contrary, we discovered
that when the FeNi layer is discontinuous and represented by randomly
distributed superparamagnetic FeNi nanoislands, the Ta layer normalized dc
conductivity falls down below the MIR limit by about 60%. The discovered effect
leading to the dc conductivity fall below the MIR limit can be associated with
non-ergodicity and purely quantum (many-body) localisation phenomena, which
need to be challenged further.
