8.

5 Effects of Degeneracy 481

lo"

114
- 0 oc
-e-lOkOeFC
+30k Oc FC
-m- 30k Oe FCW

I - I.. a I , c * I 8
-
---b 50k
-3-

I
Oe FC
6Ok Oc FC
70k Oe FC

*. * , I
0 50 100 150 200 250 300
Temperature [K]

Figure 8.13: Negative magnetoresistivity in Pro.aSro.5MnO3 in fields up to 7T.

p may get halved due to the suppression of spin disorder scattering for T near the
Curie Tc z 270K. At 100-150K, the change in p is "colossal", corresponding to a
field-induced insulator-to-metal transition (after [402]).

back to the problem of Wigner crystallization which we posed first in

Ch. 1, Sec. 1.3.3. However, while the complicated structure of magnetite
precludes any straightforward discussion of the charge ordering (CO),
some doped manganites provide beautiful examples of Wigner electron
crystals.
This may be the right occasion to clarify our standpoint on Wigner
crystals, and to explain why neither of the sections bears the title
"Wigner crystallization" (actually, the present one might have been
named so). Originally, Wigner [440]predicted that an electron liq-
uid moving on a uniform compensating charge background crystallizes
if the electron density is sufficiently small, because the interelectronic
repulsion eventually outweighs the kinetic energy. The critical value of
the density was repeatedly revised, always to smaller values. We take
the view that the Wigner crystal in this original sense is not realizable.
True that related phenomena seem to be observed in doped semicon-