Evidence of Coulomb liquid phase in few-electron droplets
In this work, we study the partitioning statistics of a five-electron droplet transported by a surface acoustic wave to a Y junction. Thanks to single-shot detection of the collision products, we extract the multivariate cumulants up to fifth order associated to the partitioning statistics of the multi-electron state and demonstrate all-body correlations. We observe the emergence of a strongly-correlated Coulomb liquid phase by examining the finite-size scaling of multivariate cumulants as they approach the thermodynamic limit, within a theoretical framework based on an effective Ising model on a complete graph. Our electron-droplet collider provides key insights into how confinement and interactions affect small electron systems, offering a new way to study engineered states of matter.
Jashwanth Shaju, Elina Pavloska, Ralfs Suba, Junliang Wang, Seddik Ouacel et al.
