Artificial Haldane gap material on a semiconductor chip

We show how nanostructuring of a metallic gate of a field-effect transistor (FET) converts the electron channel of an FET to an artificial Haldane chain with a gap in the energy spectrum. A specially designed gate structure creates a chain of triple quantum dot molecules. The electrons localized in the molecules realize a spin-half Heisenberg chain with spin–spin interactions alternating between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic. The quantum state of an FET is a semiconductor implementation of an integer spin-one antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with a unique correlated ground state and a finite energy gap, originally conjectured by Haldane.