Evidence of Coulomb liquid phase in few-electron droplets
Abstract
Emergence of universal collective behaviour from interactions within a sufficiently large group of elementary constituents is a fundamental scientific paradigm. In physics, correlations in fluctuating microscopic observables can provide key information about collective states of matter such as deconfined quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions or expanding quantum degenerate gases. Mesoscopic colliders, through shot-noise measurements, have provided smoking-gun evidence on the nature of exotic electronic excitations such as fractional charges, levitons and anyon statistics. Yet, bridging the gap between two-particle collisions and the emergence of collectivity as the number of interacting particles increases remains a challenging task at the microscopic level. Here we demonstrate all-body correlations in the partitioning of electron droplets containing up to N = 5 electrons, driven by a moving potential well through a Y-junction in a semiconductor device. Analyzing the partitioning data using high-order multivariate cumulants and finite-size scaling towards the thermodynamic limit reveals distinctive fingerprints of a strongly-correlated Coulomb liquid. These fingerprints agree well with a universal limit where the partitioning of a droplet is predicted by a single collective variable. Our electron-droplet collider provides critical insight into the interplay of confinement and interaction effects in small electron systems and highlights a new way to study engineered states of matter.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.14458,
title = {Evidence of Coulomb liquid phase in few-electron droplets},
author = {Jashwanth Shaju and Elina Pavlovska and Ralfs Suba and Junliang Wang and Seddik Ouacel and Thomas Vasselon and Matteo Aluffi and Lucas Mazzella and Clément Geffroy and Arne Ludwig and Andreas D. Wieck and Matias Urdampilleta and Christopher Bäuerle and Vyacheslavs Kashcheyevs and Hermann Sellier},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.14458},
year = {2025}
}