Spin effect on the low-temperature resistivity maximum in a strongly interacting 2D electron system

Abstract

The increase in the resistivity with decreasing temperature followed by a drop by more than one order of magnitude is observed on the metallic side near the zero-magnetic-field metal-insulator transition in a strongly interacting two-dimensional electron system in ultra-clean SiGe/Si/SiGe quantum wells. We find that the temperature Tmax, at which the resistivity exhibits a maximum, is close to the renormalized Fermi temperature, in agreement with the dynamical mean-field theory. However, rather than increasing along with the Fermi temperature, the value Tmax decreases appreciably for spinless electrons in spin-polarizing magnetic fields, which is in contradiction with the theory in its current form. Remarkably, the characteristic scaling of the resistivity, predicted by the theory, holds in both spin-unpolarized and completely spin-polarized systems.