Spontaneous Breaking of the SU(3) Flavor Symmetry in a Quantum Hall Valley Nematic
arXiv:2510.13874 · doi:10.1103/y8bd-y5ht
Abstract
Two-dimensional quantum materials can host original electronic phases that arise from the interplay of electronic correlations, symmetry and topology. In particular, the spontaneous breaking of internal symmetry that acts simultaneously on the pseudospin and the spatial degree of freedom realizes a nematic ordering. We report evidence of a quantum Hall valley nematic phase with an underlying SU(3) order parameter space obtained by a spontaneous polarization between the threefold degenerate valley pseudospins in Pb1-xSnxSe quantum wells. In the presence of a Zeeman field, we demonstrate a further control of the nematic ordering with an explicit symmetry breaking. Evidence of both spontaneous and explicit SU(3) symmetry breaking, reminiscent of the quark flavor paradigm, is of fundamental interest to shape the many body physics in a SU(3) system.
10 pages, 3 figure, 1 supplementary materials
References in corpus (15)
- Quantum Hall Ferromagnetism in Graphene
- Landau Level Splitting in Graphene in High Magnetic Fields
- Collective Modes and Skyrmion Excitations in Graphene SU(4) Quantum Hall Ferromagnets
- Valley splitting of AlAs two-dimensional electrons in a perpendicular magnetic field
- Visualizing Broken Symmetry and Topological Defects in a Quantum Hall Ferromagnet
- Observation of Quantum Hall Valley Skyrmions
- Nematic Valley Ordering in Quantum Hall Systems
- Interacting multi-channel topological boundary modes in a quantum Hall valley system
- Valley-Polarized quantum Hall phase in a strain-controlled Dirac system
- Robust Quantum Hall Ferromagnetism near a Gate-Tuned ν = 1 Landau Level Crossing
- Landau level spectroscopy of PbSnSe topological crystalline insulator
- Interaction between interface and massive states in multivalley topological heterostructures
- Electrical noise spectroscopy of magnons in a quantum Hall ferromagnet
- Fractional quantum Hall valley ferromagnetism in the extreme quantum limit
- Quantum Hall valley Ferromagnets as a platform for topologically protected quantum memory