English

Connecting the Reentrant Insulating Phase and the Zero Field Metal-Insulator Transition in a 2D Hole System

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2012-03-14 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

We present the transport and capacitance measurements of 10nm wide GaAs quantum wells with hole densities around the critical point of the 2D metal-insulator transition (critical density pcp_c down to 0.8×1010\times10^{10}/cm2^2, rsr_s\sim36). For metallic hole density pc<p<pc+0.15×1010p_c < p <p_c +0.15\times10^{10}/cm2^2, a reentrant insulating phase (RIP) is observed between the ν\nu=1 quantum Hall state and the zero field metallic state and is attributed to the formation of pinned Wigner crystal. Through studying the evolution of the RIP versus 2D hole density by transport and capacitance experiments, we show that the RIP is incompressible and continuously connected to the zero field insulator, suggesting a similar origin for these two phases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.5232,
  title  = {Connecting the Reentrant Insulating Phase and the Zero Field Metal-Insulator Transition in a 2D Hole System},
  author = {Richard L. J. Qiu and Xuan P. A. Gao and L. N. Pfeiffer and K. W. West},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.5232},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

pdf with higher resolution figures and other related papers can be found at http://gaogroup.case.edu