1. Bloch ferromagnetism of composite fermions
- Author
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Songyang Pu, Loren Pfeiffer, Kirk Baldwin, Jainendra K. Jain, Yoon Jang Chung, K. A. Villegas Rosales, Ken W. West, Shafayat Hossain, Mansour Shayegan, Tongzhou Zhao, M. A. Mueed, and Meng K. Ma
- Subjects
Physics ,Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) ,Condensed Matter - Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics ,Condensed matter physics ,Spins ,Exchange interaction ,FOS: Physical sciences ,General Physics and Astronomy ,Landau quantization ,01 natural sciences ,7. Clean energy ,010305 fluids & plasmas ,Condensed Matter - Strongly Correlated Electrons ,Ferromagnetism ,Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) ,0103 physical sciences ,Composite fermion ,Condensed Matter::Strongly Correlated Electrons ,010306 general physics ,Fermi gas ,Ground state ,Spin-½ - Abstract
In 1929, Felix Bloch suggested that the paramagnetic Fermi sea of electrons should make a spontaneous transition to a fully magnetized state at very low densities, because the exchange energy gained by aligning the spins exceeds the enhancement in the kinetic energy1. However, experimental realizations of this effect have been hard to implement. Here, we report the observation of an abrupt, interaction-driven transition to full magnetization, highly reminiscent of Bloch ferromagnetism. Our platform utilizes the two-dimensional Fermi sea of composite fermions near half-filling of the lowest Landau level. We measure the Fermi wavevector—which directly provides the spin polarization—and observe a sudden transition from a partially spin-polarized to a fully spin-polarized ground state as we lower the density of the composite fermions. Our theoretical calculations that take Landau level mixing into account provide a semi-quantitative account of this phenomenon. Composite fermions can be tuned to very low effective density in a clean two-dimensional electron gas, which allows the formation of a Bloch ferromagnet.
- Published
- 2020
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