No Arabic abstract
Protected edge modes are the cornerstone of topological states of matter. The simplest example is provided by the integer quantum Hall state at Landau level filling unity, which should feature a single chiral mode carrying electronic excitations. In the presence of a smooth confining potential it was hitherto believed that this picture may only be partially modified by the appearance of additional counterpropagating integer-charge modes. Here, we demonstrate the breakdown of this paradigm: The system favors the formation of edge modes supporting fractional excitations. This accounts for previous observations, and leads to additional predictions amenable to experimental tests.
We propose ways to create and detect fractionally charged excitations in emph{integer} quantum Hall edge states. The charge fractionalization occurs due to the Coulomb interaction between electrons propagating on different edge channels. The fractional charge of the soliton-like collective excitations can be observed in time resolved or frequency dependent shot noise measurements.
In this review the physics of Pfaffian paired states, in the context of fractional quantum Hall effect, is discussed using field-theoretical approaches. The Pfaffian states are prime examples of topological ($p$-wave) Cooper pairing and are characterized by non-Abelian statistics of their quasiparticles. Here we focus on conditions for their realization and competition among them at half-integer filling factors. Using the Dirac composite fermion description, in the presence of a mass term, we study the influence of Landau level mixing in selecting a particular Pfaffian state. While Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian are selected when Landau level mixing is not strong, and can be taken into account perturbatively, the PH Pfaffian state requires non-perturbative inclusion of at least two Landau levels. Our findings, for small Landau level mixing, are in accordance with numerical investigations in the literature, and call for a non-perturbative approach in the search for PH Pfaffian correlations. We demonstrated that a method based on the Chern-Simons field-theoretical approach can be used to generate characteristic interaction pseudo-potentials for Pfaffian paired states.
We report the observation of the quantized Hall effect in suspended graphene probed with a two-terminal lead geometry. The failure of earlier Hall-bar measurements is discussed and attributed to the placement of voltage probes in mesoscopic samples. New quantized states are found at integer Landau level fillings outside the sequence 2,6,10.., as well as at a fractional filling u=1/3. Their presence is revealed by plateaus in the two-terminal conductance which appear in magnetic fields as low as 2 Tesla at low temperatures and persist up to 20 Kelvin in 12 Tesla. The excitation gaps, extracted from the data with the help of a theoretical model, are found to be significantly larger than in GaAs based electron systems.
We measure the conductance of a quantum point contact (QPC) while the biased tip of a scanning probe microscope induces a depleted region in the electron gas underneath. At finite magnetic field we find plateaus in the real-space maps of the conductance as a function of tip position at integer ( u=1,2,3,4,6,8) and fractional ( u=1/3,2/3,5/3,4/5) values of transmission. They resemble theoretically predicted compressible and incompressible stripes of quantum Hall edge states. The scanning tip allows us to shift the constriction limiting the conductance in real space over distances of many microns. The resulting stripes of integer and fractional filling factors are rugged on the micron scale, i.e. on a scale much smaller than the zero-field elastic mean free path of the electrons. Our experiments demonstrate that microscopic inhomogeneities are relevant even in high-quality samples and lead to locally strongly fluctuating widths of incompressible regions even down to their complete suppression for certain tip positions. The macroscopic quantization of the Hall resistance measured experimentally in a non-local contact configuration survives in the presence of these inhomogeneities, and the relevant local energy scale for the u=2 state turns out to be independent of tip position.
Charge equilibration between quantum-Hall edge states can be studied to reveal geometric structure of edge channels not only in the integer quantum Hall (IQH) regime but also in the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) regime particularly for hole-conjugate states. Here we report on a systematic study of charge equilibration in both IQH and FQH regimes by using a generalized Hall bar, in which a quantum Hall state is nested in another quantum Hall state with different Landau filling factors. This provides a feasible way to evaluate equilibration in various conditions even in the presence of scattering in the bulk region. The validity of the analysis is tested in the IQH regime by confirming consistency with previous works. In the FQH regime, we find that the equilibration length for counter-propagating $delta u $ = 1 and $delta u $ = -1/3 channels along a hole-conjugate state at Landau filling factor $ u $ = 2/3 is much shorter than that for co-propagating $delta u $ = 1 and $delta u $ = 1/3 channels along a particle state at $ u $ = 4/3. The difference can be associated to the distinct geometric structures of the edge channels. Our analysis with generalized Hall bar devices would be useful in studying edge equilibration and edge structures.