Transport in Two Dimensional Electronic Micro-emulsions

Abstract

In two dimensional electron systems with Coulomb or dipolar interactions, a direct transition, whether first or second order, from a liquid to a crystalline state is forbidden. As a result, between these phases there must be other (microemulsion) phases which can be viewed as a meso-scale mixture of the liquid and crystalline phases. We investigate the transport properties of these new electronic phases and present arguments that they are responsible for the various transport anomalies that have been seen in experiments on the strongly correlated 2DEG in high mobility semiconductor devices with low electron densities.