Imaging the zigzag Wigner crystal in confinement-tunable quantum wires

Abstract

The existence of Wigner crystallization, one of the most significant hallmarks of strong electron correlations, has to date only been definitively observed in two-dimensional systems. In one-dimensional (1D) quantum wires Wigner crystals correspond to regularly spaced electrons; however, weakening the confinement and allowing the electrons to relax in a second dimension is predicted to lead to the formation of a new ground state constituting a zigzag chain with nontrivial spin phases and properties. Here we report the observation of such zigzag Wigner crystals by use of on-chip charge and spin detectors employing electron focusing to image the charge density distribution and probe their spin properties. This experiment demonstrates both the structural and spin phase diagrams of the 1D Wigner crystallization. The existence of zigzag spin chains and phases which can be electrically controlled in semiconductor systems may open avenues for experimental studies of Wigner crystals and their technological applications in spintronics and quantum information.

13 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Zero-Magnetic Field Fractional Quantum States
• Cooling low-dimensional electron systems into the microkelvin regime
• One-dimensional few-electron effective Wigner crystal in quantum and classical regimes
• Engineering electron wavefunctions in asymmetrically confined quasi one-dimensional structures
• Thermoelectric Scanning Gate Interferometry on a Quantum Point Contact
• Temperature Dependence of Electron Viscosity in Superballistic GaAs Point Contacts
• Electronic Wigner-Molecule Polymeric Chains in Elongated Silicon Quantum Dots and Finite-Length Quantum Wires
• Slip electron flow in GaAs microscale constrictions
• The Wigner localization of interacting electrons in a one-dimensional harmonic potential
• Artificial versus Natural Atoms: The uncanny capability of the many-body Schrödinger equation to produce emergent behavior
• On-chip quantum sensing of Kondo spins in a high-mobility quasi-one-dimensional nanoconstriction