Phase of phonon-induced resistance oscillations in a high-mobility two-dimensional electron gas

Abstract: We report on experimental studies of magnetoresistance oscillations that originate from the resonant interaction of two-dimensional electrons with thermal transverse-acoustic phonons in very high-mobility GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells. We find that the oscillation maxima consistently occur when a frequency of a phonon with twice the Fermi momentum exceeds an integer multiple of the cyclotron frequency. This observation is in contrast to to all previous experiments associating resistance maxima with magnetophonon resonance and its harmonics. Our experimentally obtained resonant condition is in excellent quantitative agreement with recent theoretical proposals.