Resymmetrizing Broken Symmetry with Hydraulic Pressure

Ke Huang, Pengjie Wang, L. N. Pfeiffer, K. W. West, K. W. Baldwin, Yang Liu, Xi Lin

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

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 10 μeV, well beyond the meV-level state-of-the-art resolution of other techniques.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number206602
JournalPhysical review letters
Volume123
Issue number20
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 15 2019
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Physics and Astronomy

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