Previous studies have demonstrated the sensitivity of the amplitude of the microwave radiation-induced magnetoresistance oscillations to the microwave polarization. These studies have also shown that there exists a phase shift in the linear polarization angle dependence. But the physical origin of this phase shift is still unclear. Therefore, the first part of this dissertation analyzes the phase shift by averaging over other small contributions, when those contributions are smaller than experimental uncertainties. The analysis indicates nontrivial frequency dependence of the phase shift. The second part of the dissertation continues the study of the phase shift and the results suggest that the specimen exhibits only one preferred radiation orientation for different Hall-bar sections. The third part of the dissertation summarizes our study of the Hall and longitudinal resistance oscillations induced by microwave frequency and dc bias at low filling factors. Here, the phase of these resistance oscillations depends on the contact pair on the device, and the period of oscillations appears to be inversely proportional to radiation frequency.

This dissertation summarizes three research projects related to microwave radiation induced electron transport properties in the GaAs/AlGaAs two dimensional electron systems. In chronological order, the projects are: a microwave reflection and electron magneto-transport correlation study, the combined microwave power and polarization dependence on microwave radiation induced magneto-resistance oscillations study, and a comparative study about the effect of circularly polarized and linearly polarized microwaves radiation on magneto-resistance oscillations induced due to the microwave. These three research projects experimentally address many interesting issues in the non-equilibrium low dimensional electron transport under microwave irradiation and provide potential applications of utilizing microwave radiation induced magneto-resistance oscillations in two dimensional electron systems as a method to detect different qualities of microwaves or terahertz waves.