期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2021
卷号：118
期号：47
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2113185118
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
The strongly two-dimensional delafossite metals are among the highest-purity compounds known. Their huge low-temperature electron mean free paths of up to 20 µm allow fabrication of devices in the ballistic regime, in which the characteristic device dimension is shorter than the average distance between scattering events. Unlike any previous case in which this regime has been reached, the faceting of the nearly hexagonal Fermi surfaces leads to extremely strong directional effects. Remarkably, in the ballistic regime, this results in the transport response of squares sculpted from delafossite crystals not showing full fourfold symmetry. Although seemingly counterintuitive, our observations are consistent with the overall symmetry of the device–Fermi surface combination and fully obey the Onsager–Büttiker relations for nonlocal transport.
Intense work studying the ballistic regime of electron transport in two-dimensional systems based on semiconductors and graphene had been thought to have established most of the key experimental facts of the field. In recent years, however, additional forms of ballistic transport have become accessible in the quasi–two-dimensional delafossite metals, whose Fermi wavelength is a factor of 100 shorter than those typically studied in the previous work and whose Fermi surfaces are nearly hexagonal in shape and therefore strongly faceted. This has some profound consequences for results obtained from the classic ballistic transport experiment of studying bend and Hall resistances in mesoscopic squares fabricated from delafossite single crystals. We observe pronounced anisotropies in bend resistances and even a Hall voltage that is strongly asymmetric in magnetic field. Although some of our observations are nonintuitive at first sight, we show that they can be understood within a nonlocal Landauer-Büttiker analysis tailored to the symmetries of the square/hexagonal geometries of our combined device/Fermi surface system. Signatures of nonlocal transport can be resolved for squares of linear dimension of nearly 100 µm, approximately a factor of 15 larger than the bulk mean free path of the crystal from which the device was fabricated.
