Discover the latest scientific publication of EQUBITFLY in Nature by J. Shaju et al.
Evidence of Coulomb liquid phase in few-electron droplets.
J. Shaju, E. Pavlovska, R. Suba, J. Wang, S. Ouacel, T. Vasselon, M. Aluffi, L. Mazzella, C. Geffroy, A. Ludwig, A. D. Wieck, M. Urdampilleta, C. Bäuerle, V. Kashcheyevs & H. Sellier. Nature, 642, 928-933 (2025).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09139-z
Abstract:
Emergence of universal collective behaviour from interactions within a sufficiently large group of elementary constituents is a fundamental scientific concept. 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. Mesoscopic colliders, through shot-noise measurements, have provided smoking-gun evidence on the nature of exotic electronic excitations such as fractional charges, levitons and anyon statistics. Yet, bridging the gap between two-particle collisions and the emergence of collectivity as the number of interacting particles increases remains a challenging task at the microscopic level. Here we demonstrate all-body correlations in the partitioning of electron droplets containing up to N = 5 electrons, driven by a moving potential well through a Y-junction in a semiconductor device. Analysing the partitioning data using high-order multivariate cumulants and finite-size scaling towards the thermodynamic limit reveals distinctive fingerprints of a strongly correlated Coulomb liquid. These fingerprints agree well with a universal limit at which the partitioning of a droplet is predicted by a single collective variable. Our electron-droplet scattering experiments illustrate how coordinated behaviour emerges through interactions of only a few elementary constituents. Studying similar signatures in other physical platforms such as cold-atom simulators or collections of anyonic excitations may help identify emergence of exotic phases and, more broadly, advance understanding of matter engineering.
