Article Dans Une Revue Nature Année : 2025

Partitioning statistics of a correlated few-electron droplet

Résumé

Emergence of universal collective behaviour from interactions in a sufficiently large group of elementary constituents is a fundamental scientific paradigm. In physics, correlations in fluctuating microscopic observables can provide key information about collective states of matter such as deconfined quark-gluon plasma in heavy-ion collisions or expanding quantum degenerate gases. Two-particle correlations in mesoscopic colliders have provided smoking-gun evidence on the nature of exotic electronic excitations such as fractional charges, levitons and anyon statistics. Yet the gap between two-particle collisions and the emergence of collectivity as the number of interacting particles grows is hard to address at the microscopic level. Here, we demonstrate all-body correlations in the partitioning of up to $N = 5$ electron droplets driven by a moving potential well through a Y-junction in a semiconductor. We show that the measured multivariate cumulants (of order $k = 2$ to $N$) of the electron droplet are accurately described by $k$-spin correlation functions of an effective Ising model below the Néel temperature and can be interpreted as a Coulomb liquid in the thermodynamic limit. Finite size scaling of high-order correlation functions provides otherwise inaccessible fingerprints of emerging order. Our demonstration of emergence in a simple correlated electron collider opens a new way to study engineered states of matter.

Dates et versions

hal-04694732 , version 1 (11-09-2024)

Identifiants

Citer

Jashwanth Shaju, Elina Pavlovska, Ralfs Suba, Junliang Wang, Seddik Ouacel, et al.. Partitioning statistics of a correlated few-electron droplet. Nature, 2025, 642 (8069), pp.928-933. ⟨10.1038/s41586-025-09139-z⟩. ⟨hal-04694732⟩
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