Testing the Tomographic Fermi Liquid Hypothesis with High-Order Cyclotron Resonance

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I. Moiseenko, E. Mönch, K. Kapralov, D. Bandurin, S. Ganichev, D. Svintsov

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Physical Review Letters 134, 226902 (2025)

The tomographic Fermi liquid (TFL) hypothesis posits starkly different relaxation times for odd and even angular harmonics of electron distribution function in two-dimensional systems, but its experimental verification remains elusive. Traditional electrical transport struggles to discern these lifetimes, as resistivity is largely unaffected by electron scattering. Here, we demonstrate that high-order cyclotron resonance (CR) offers a direct probe: The linewidth of the mth CR peak directly reflects the relaxation rate γm ¼ 1=τm of the corresponding angular harmonic. Combining theory and terahertz photoconductivity measurements in graphene, we show that the third-order CR exhibits a narrower linewidth than the secondorder CR, yielding τ3 > τ2. This hierarchy defies conventional impurity or phonon scattering models, instead aligning with TFL predictions where odd harmonics evade relaxation via head-on collisions. Our results provide definitive evidence for the TFL regime and establish high-order CR as a powerful tool to unravel hydrodynamic transport in quantum materials.

Testing the Tomographic Fermi Liquid Hypothesis with High-Order Cyclotron Resonance | Phys. Rev. Lett.