English

Observation of An Anisotropic Wigner Crystal

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2016-09-07 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

We report a new correlated phase of two-dimensional charged carriers in high magnetic fields, manifested by an anisotropic insulating behavior at low temperatures. It appears near Landau level filling factor ν=1/2\nu=1/2 in hole systems confined to wide GaAs quantum wells when the sample is tilted in magnetic field to an intermediate angle. The parallel field component (BB_{||}) leads to a crossing of the lowest two Landau levels, and an elongated hole wavefunction in the direction of BB_{||}. Under these conditions, the in-plane resistance exhibits an insulating behavior, with the resistance along BB_{||} more than 10 times smaller than the resistance perpendicular to BB_{||}. We interpret this anisotropic insulating phase as a two-component, striped Wigner crystal.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.07135,
  title  = {Observation of An Anisotropic Wigner Crystal},
  author = {Yang Liu and S. Hasdemir and L. N. Pfeiffer and K. W. West and K. W. Baldwin and M. Shayegan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.07135},
  year   = {2016}
}