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Carrier transport in materials is often diffusive due to momentum-relaxing scattering with phonons and defects. Suppression of momentum-relaxing scattering can lead to the ballistic and hydrodynamic transport regimes, wherein complex non-Ohmic current flow patterns, including current vortices, can emerge. In the ballistic regime addressed here, transverse magnetic focusing is habitually understood in a familiar single-particle picture of carriers injected from a source, following ballistic cyclotron orbits and reaching a detector. We report on a distinctive nonlocal magnetoresistance phenomenon exclusive to fermions, in an enclosed mesoscopic geometry wherein transverse focusing magnetoresistance peaks also occur at values of the cyclotron diameter that are incommensurate with the distance between the source and detector. In low-temperature experiments and simulations using GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures with high electron mobility, we show that the peaks occur independently of the location of the detector, and only depend on the source-drain separation. We reproduce the experimental findings using simulations of ballistic transport in both semiclassical and quantum-coherent transport models. The periodicity of magnetic field at which the peaks occur is matched to the lithographically defined device scale. It is found that, unlike in transverse magnetic focusing, the magnetoresistance structure cannot be attributed to any set of ordered single-particle trajectories but instead requires accounting for the collective dynamics of the fermion distribution and of all particle trajectories. The magnetoresistance is further associated with current flow vorticity, a collective phenomenon., Comment: 11 figures

We study hydrodynamic and ballistic transport regimes through nonlocal resistance measurements and high-resolution kinetic simulations in a mesoscopic structure on a high-mobility two-dimensional electron system in a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. We evince the existence of collective transport phenomena in both regimes and demonstrate that negative nonlocal resistances and current vortices are not exclusive to only the hydrodynamic regime. The combined experiments and simulations highlight the importance of device design, measurement schemes and one-to-one modeling of experimental devices to demarcate various transport regimes., Comment: 3 figures and supplemental material

Electronic transport in Fermi liquids is usually Ohmic, because of momentum-relaxing scattering due to defects and phonons. These processes can become sufficiently weak in two-dimensional materials, giving rise to either ballistic or hydrodynamic transport, depending on the strength of electron-electron scattering. We show that the ballistic regime is a quantum critical point (QCP) on the regime boundary separating Ohmic and hydrodynamic transport. The QCP corresponds to a \emph{free} conformal field theory (CFT) with a dynamical scaling exponent $z = 1$. Its nontrivial aspects emerge in device geometries with shear, wherein the regime has an intrinsic universal dissipation, a nonlocal current-voltage relation, and exhibits the critical scaling of the underlying CFT. The Fermi surface has electron-hole pockets across all angular scales and the current flow has \emph{vortices} at all spatial scales. We image the fluctuations in high-definition and animate their emergence as experimental parameters are tuned to the QCP (movie links in comments). The vortices clearly demonstrate that Pauli exclusion alone can produce collective effects, with low-frequency AC transport mediated by vortex dynamics. The scale-invariant spatial structure is much richer than that of an interaction-dominated hydrodynamic regime, which only has a single vortex at the device scale. Our findings provide a theoretical framework for both interaction-free and interaction-dominated non-Ohmic transport in two-dimensional materials, as seen in several contemporary experiments., Comment: Movies: (1) Spatial fluctuations: https://vimeo.com/365020115 [1 min 19 secs] , (2) Regime transitions and Fermi surface fluctuations: https://vimeo.com/364982637 [1 min 49 secs], (3) Vortex dynamics and frequency crossover in the ballistic regime: https://vimeo.com/366725650 [1 min 48 secs] Main text: 6 pages + 4 figures Methods + supplementary: 4 pages + 6 figures

Electron-electron (e-e) interactions assume a cardinal role in solid-state physics. Quantifying the e-e scattering length is hence critical. In this paper we show that the mesoscopic phenomenon of transverse magnetic focusing (TMF) in two-dimensional electron systems forms a precise and sensitive technique to measure this length scale. Conversely we quantitatively demonstrate that e-e scattering is the predominant effect limiting TMF amplitudes in high-mobility materials. Using high-resolution kinetic simulations, we show that the TMF amplitude at a maximum decays exponentially as a function of the e-e scattering length, which leads to a ready approach to extract this length from the measured TMF amplitudes. The approach is applied to measure the temperature-dependent e-e scattering length in high-mobility GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures. The simulations further reveal current vortices that accompany the cyclotron orbits - a collective phenomenon counterintuitive to the ballistic transport underlying a TMF setting.

Electron transport in clean 2D systems with weak electron-phonon (e-ph) coupling can transition from an Ohmic to a ballistic or a hydrodynamic regime. The ballistic regime occurs when electron-electron (e-e) scattering is weak whereas the hydrodynamic regime arises when this scattering is strong. Despite this difference, we find that vortices and a negative nonlocal resistance believed to be quintessentially hydrodynamic are equally characteristic of the ballistic regime. These non-Ohmic regimes cannot be distinguished in DC transport without changing experimental conditions. Further, as our kinetic calculations show, the hydrodynamic regime in DC transport is highly fragile and is wiped out by even sparse disorder and e-ph scattering. We show that microwave-frequency AC sources by contrast readily excite hydrodynamic modes with current vortices that are robust to disorder and e-ph scattering. Indeed, current reversals in the non-Ohmic regimes occur via repeated vortex generation and mergers through reconnections, as in classical 2D fluids. Crucially, AC sources give rise to strong correlations across the entire device that unambiguously distinguish all regimes. These correlations in the form of nonlocal current-voltage and voltage-voltage phases directly check for the presence of a nonlocal current-voltage relation signifying the onset of non-Ohmic behavior as well as also for the dominance of bulk interactions, needed to confirm the presence of a hydrodynamic regime. We use these probes to demarcate all regimes in an experimentally realizable graphene device and find that the ballistic regime has a much larger extent in parameter space than the hydrodynamic regime., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 2 movies, 2 appendices. V2 expands on V1 and includes several new results: (a) current vortices in ballistic regime, (b) degeneracy of hydrodynamic and ballistic regimes in DC transport, (c) correlation signatures to distinguish hydrodynamic and ballistic regimes in AC transport