Abstract
Until the late 1980s, phases of matter were understood in terms of Landau’s symmetry-breaking theory. Following the discovery of the quantum Hall effect, the introduction of a second class of phases, those with topological order, was necessary. Phase transitions within the first class of phases involve a change in symmetry, whereas those between topological phases require a change in topological order. However, in rare cases, transitions may occur between the two classes, in which the vanishing of the topological order is accompanied by the emergence of a broken symmetry. Here, we report the existence of such a transition in a two-dimensional electron gas hosted by a GaAs/AlGaAs crystal. When tuned by hydrostatic pressure, the ν = 5/2 fractional quantum Hall state, believed to be a prototypical non-Abelian topological phase, gives way to a quantum Hall nematic phase. Remarkably, this nematic phase develops spontaneously, in the absence of any externally applied symmetry-breaking fields.
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Acknowledgements
Sample growth and measurement at Purdue were supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under the award DE-SC0006671. E.F. acknowledges the US National Science Foundation grant DMR 1408713. We thank J. P. Eisenstein for his comments and M. Siqueira for advice on using the pressure cell.
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N.S., M.J.M. and G.A.C. conceived the experiment. G.C.G. and M.J.M. grew the GaAs/AlGaAs wafer. N.S. fabricated the sample. N.S., K.A.S. and G.A.C. performed the measurements and analysed the data. The manuscript was written by K.A.S. and G.A.C. with input from all authors and with critical contributions from E.F.
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Samkharadze, N., Schreiber, K., Gardner, G. et al. Observation of a transition from a topologically ordered to a spontaneously broken symmetry phase. Nature Phys 12, 191–195 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3523
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3523
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