2017/04/25 by Sayan Basak, E. W. Carlson, Erica W. Carlson
Physics and Astronomy · #Anisotropy #Condensed matter physics #Electron #Ising model #Lattice (music) #Liquid crystal #Physics #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Renormalization group #Semiconductor Quantum Structures and Devices #Symmetry breaking #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.96.081303
published as Phys. Rev. B 96, 081303 (2017) · 5 Pages and 6 Figures - Main text, 3 Pages and 7 Figures - Supplementary Information
arxiv created 2017/04/25 · openalex publication_date 2017/08/11 · arxiv updated 2017/08/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
At low temperatures in ultraclean GaAs-AlGaAs heterojunctions, high Landau levels near half-integral filling break rotational symmetry, leading to increasingly anisotropic transport properties as temperature is lowered below \ensuremath∼150\phantom\rule0.28em0exmK. While the onset of transport anisotropy is well described by an XY model of an electron nematic in the presence of a weak uniform symmetry-breaking term, the low-temperature behavior deviates significantly from this model. We find that inclusion of interactions between the electron nematic and the underlying crystalline lattice in the form of a fourfold symmetry-breaking term is sufficient to describe the entire temperature dependence of the transport anisotropy at \ensuremathν=9/2. This implies that this electron nematic is in the Ising universality class. We propose new experimental tests that can distinguish whether any two-dimensional electron nematic is in the XY or Ising universality class.