Speaker: Vladimir Dobrosavljevic, Florida State University
Abstract: Significant experimental advances over the past ten years have provided beautiful and convincing evidence for the existence of a sharp metal-insulator transition (MIT) in the two-dimensional 2D electron gases (2DEG). The best evidence for a sharp MIT is found in the cleanest samples, suggesting that key experimental features can all be understood by deliberately disregarding disorder, and focusing on interaction effects alone: viewing the quantum melting of a Wigner crystal as the fundamental mechanism for the MIT in a sufficiently clean 2DEG. A theory describing this phenomenon will be presented, which provides a natural explanation of several puzzling experimental features, including the large effective mass enhancement, the large resistivity drop on the metallic side, and the giant magneto-resistance in presence of a parallel magnetic field.