McGill.CA / Science / Department of Physics

CPM Seminar

A New Liquid Phase and Metal-Insulator Transition
in 2D Electron Systems *

Prof. X.C. Xie

Department of Physics
Oklahoma State University

In this talk I will present evidence that there is a new liquid phase in the two-dimensional electron system in Si MOSFETs at low enough electron densities. The recently observed metal-insulator transition results as a crossover from the percolation transition of the liquid phase through the disorder landscape in the system below the liquid-gas critical temperature. The consequences of our theory are discussed for variety of physical properties relevant to the recent experiments.

* A part of the work has been published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3324 (1998). The work was done in collaboration with Song He from Lucent Technologies and Jun-Ren Shi from Oklahoma State University.

Wednesday, September 9th 1998, 15:30
Ernest Rutherford Physics Building, Boardroom (room 104)