Resymmetrizing Broken Symmetry with Hydraulic Pressure

Ke Huang, Pengjie Wang, L. N. Pfeiffer, K. W. West, K. W. Baldwin, Yang Liu, and Xi Lin
Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 206602 – Published 15 November 2019

Abstract

Recent progress in condensed matter physics, such as for graphene, topological insulators, and Weyl semimetals, often originate from the specific topological symmetries of their lattice structures. Quantum states with different degrees of freedom, e.g., spin, valley, layer, etc., arise from these symmetries, and the coherent superposition of these states form multiple energy subbands. The pseudospin, a concept analogous to the Dirac spinor matrices, is a successful description of such multisubband systems. When the electron-electron interaction dominates, many-body quantum phases arise. They usually have discrete pseudospin polarizations and exhibit sharp phase transitions at certain universal critical pseudospin energy splittings. In this Letter, we present our discovery of hydrostatic-pressure-induced degeneracy between the two lowest Landau levels. This degeneracy is evidenced by the pseudospin polarization transitions of the fragile correlated quantum liquid phases near the Landau level filling factor ν=3/2. Benefitting from the constant hole concentration and the sensitive nature of these transitions, we study the fine-tuning effect of the hydrostatic pressure at the order of 10μeV, well beyond the meV-level state-of-the-art resolution of other techniques.

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  • Received 31 March 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.206602

© 2019 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Ke Huang1, Pengjie Wang1, L. N. Pfeiffer2, K. W. West2, K. W. Baldwin2, Yang Liu1,*, and Xi Lin1,3,†

  • 1International Center for Quantum Materials, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • 2Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
  • 3CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China

  • *liuyang02@pku.edu.cn
  • xilin@pku.edu.cn

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Issue

Vol. 123, Iss. 20 — 15 November 2019

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