Evidence of Novel Quasiparticles in a Strongly Interacting Two-Dimensional Electron System: Giant Thermopower and Metallic Behaviour

We report thermopower ($S$) and electrical resistivity ($\rho_{2DES}$) measurements in low-density (10$^{14}$ m$^{-2}$), mesoscopic two-dimensional electron systems (2DESs) in GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures at sub-Kelvin temperatures. We observe at temperatures $\lesssim$ 0.7 K a linearly growing $S$ as a function of temperature indicating metal-like behaviour. Interestingly this metallicity is not Drude-like, showing several unusual characteristics: i) the magnitude of $S$ exceeds the Mott prediction valid for non-interacting metallic 2DESs at similar carrier densities by over two orders of magnitude; and ii) $\rho_{2DES}$ in this regime is two orders of magnitude greater than the quantum of resistance $h/e^2$ and shows very little temperature-dependence. We provide evidence suggesting that these observations arise due to the formation of novel quasiparticles in the 2DES that are not electron-like. Finally, $\rho_{2DES}$ and $S$ show an intriguing decoupling in their density-dependence, the latter showing striking oscillations and even sign changes that are completely absent in the resistivity.Comment: QFS2012 Conference proceedings, Journal of Low Temperature Physics, accepted (figure and discussion added upon referee suggestions

Animal snoRNAs and scaRNAs with exceptional structures

The overwhelming majority of small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs) fall into two clearly defined classes characterized by distinctive secondary structures and sequence motifs. A small group of diverse ncRNAs, however, shares the hallmarks of one or both classes of snoRNAs but differs substantially from the norm in some respects. Here, we compile the available information on these exceptional cases, conduct a thorough homology search throughout the available metazoan genomes, provide improved and expanded alignments, and investigate the evolutionary histories of these ncRNA families as well as their mutual relationships