Spatially inhomogeneous electron state deep in the extreme quantum limit of strontium titanate
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Spatially inhomogeneous.pdf
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Author(s)
Bhattacharya, Anand
Khalsa, Guru
Suslov, Alexey V.
Skinner, Brian J
Date Issued
September 2016
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Bhattacharya, Anand; Skinner, Brian; Khalsa, Guru and Suslov, Alexey V. “Spatially Inhomogeneous Electron State Deep in the Extreme Quantum Limit of Strontium Titanate.” Nature Communications 7 (September 29, 2016): 12974.
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Final published version
Abstract
When an electronic system is subjected to a sufficiently strong magnetic field that the cyclotron energy is much larger than the Fermi energy, the system enters the extreme quantum limit (EQL) and becomes susceptible to a number of instabilities. Bringing a three-dimensional electronic system deeply into the EQL can be difficult however, since it requires a small Fermi energy, large magnetic field, and low disorder. Here we present an experimental study of the EQL in lightly-doped single crystals of strontium titanate. Our experiments probe deeply into the regime where theory has long predicted an interaction-driven charge density wave or Wigner crystal state. A number of interesting features arise in the transport in this regime, including a striking re-entrant nonlinearity in the current–voltage characteristics. We discuss these features in the context of possible correlated electron states, and present an alternative picture based on magnetic-field induced puddling of electrons.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12974
