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Updated: Aug 5, 2026

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Evidence of soft-mode quantum phase transitions in electron double layers
1V. Pellegrini, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA, and Scuola Normale Superiore and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia, Pisa, Italy. A. Pinczuk, Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill.
Abstract:
Inelastic light scattering by low-energy spin-excitations reveals three distinct configurations of spin of electron double layers in gallium arsenide quantum wells at even-integer quantum Hall states. The transformations among these spin states appear as quantum phase transitions driven by the interplay between Coulomb interactions and Zeeman splittings. One of the transformations correlates with the emergence of a spin-flip intersubband excitation at vanishingly low energy and provides direct evidence of a link between quantum phase transitions and soft collective excitations in a two-dimensional electron system.
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