  The intriguing idea that strongly interacting electrons can generate
spatially inhomogeneous electronic liquid crystalline phases is over a decade
old, but these systems still represent an unexplored frontier of condensed
matter physics. One reason is that visualization of the many-body quantum
states generated by the strong interactions, and of the resulting electronic
phases, has not been achieved. Soft condensed matter physics was transformed by
microscopies that allowed imaging of real-space structures and patterns. A
candidate technique for obtaining equivalent data in the purely electronic
systems is Spectroscopic Imaging Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (SI-STM). The
core challenge is to detect the tenuous but 'heavy' k-space components of the
many-body electronic state simultaneously with its r-space constituents.
Sr3Ru2O7 provides a particularly exciting opportunity to address these issues.
It possesses (i) a very strongly renormalized 'heavy' d-electron Fermi liquid
and (ii) exhibits a field-induced transition to an electronic liquid
crystalline phase. Finally, as a layered compound, it can be cleaved to present
an excellent surface for SI-STM.
