No Arabic abstract
In recent experiments, external anisotropy has been a useful tool to tune different phases and study their competitions. In this paper, we look at the quantum Hall charge density wave states in the $N=2$ Landau level. Without anisotropy, there are two first-order phase transitions between the Wigner crystal, the $2$-electron bubble phase, and the stripe phase. By adding mass anisotropy, our analytical and numerical studies show that the $2$-electron bubble phase disappears and the stripe phase significantly enlarges its domain in the phase diagram. Meanwhile, a regime of stripe crystals that may be observed experimentally is unveiled after the bubble phase gets out. Upon increase of the anisotropy, the energy of the phases at the transitions becomes progressively smooth as a function of the filling. We conclude that all first-order phase transitions are replaced by continuous phase transitions, providing a possible realisation of continuous quantum crystalline phase transitions.
Experimental signatures of charge density waves (CDW) in high-temperature superconductors have evoked much recent interest, yet an alternative interpretation has been theoretically raised based on electronic standing waves resulting from quasiparticles scattering off impurities or defects, also known as Friedel oscillations (FO). Indeed the two phenomena are similar and related, posing a challenge to their experimental differentiation. Here we report a resonant X-ray diffraction study of ZrTe$_3$, a model CDW material. Near the CDW transition, we observe two independent diffraction signatures that arise concomitantly, only to become clearly separated in momentum while developing very different correlation lengths in the well-ordered state. Anomalously slow dynamics of mesoscopic ordered nanoregions are further found near the transition temperature, in spite of the expected strong thermal fluctuations. These observations reveal that a spatially-modulated CDW phase emerges out of a uniform electronic fluid via a process that is promoted by self-amplifying FO, and identify a viable experimental route to distinguish CDW and FO.
Two-dimensional semiconductor quantum dots are studied in the the filling-factor range 2<v<3. We find both theoretical and experimental evidence of a collective many-body phenomenon, where a fraction of the trapped electrons form an incompressible spin-droplet on the highest occupied Landau level. The phenomenon occurs only when the number of electrons in the quantum dot is larger than ~30. We find the onset of the spin-droplet regime at v=5/2. This proposes a finite-geometry alternative to the Moore-Read-type Pfaffian state of the bulk two-dimensional electron gas. Hence, the spin-droplet formation may be related to the observed fragility of the v=5/2 quantum Hall state in narrow quantum point contacts.
We analyze the instability of an unpolarized uniform quantum plasma consisting of two oppositely charged fermionic components with varying mass ratios, against charge and spin density waves (CDWs and SDWs). Using density functional theory, we treat each component with the local spin density approximation and a rescaled exchange-correlation functional. Interactions between different components are treated with a mean-field approximation. In both two- and three-dimensions, we find leading unstable CDW modes in the second-order expansion of the energy functional, which would induce the transition to quantum liquid crystals. The transition point and the length of the wave-vector are computed numerically. Discontinuous ranges of the wave-vector are found for different mass ratios between the two components, indicating exotic quantum phase transitions. Phase diagrams are obtained and a scaling relation is proposed to generalize the results to two-component fermionic plasmas with any mass scale. We discuss the implications of our results and directions for further improvement in treating quantum plasmas.
We study the nature of the u=5/2 quantum Hall state in wide quantum wells under the mixing of electronic subbands and Landau levels. We introduce a general method to analyze the Moore-Read Pfaffian state and its particle-hole conjugate, the anti-Pfaffian, under periodic boundary conditions in a quartered Brillouin zone scheme containing both even and odd numbers of electrons. We examine the rotational quantum numbers on the torus, and show spontaneous breaking of the particle-hole symmetry can be observed in finite-size systems. In the presence of electronic-subband and Landau-level mixing the particle-hole symmetry is broken in such a way that the anti-Pfaffian is unambiguously favored, and becomes more robust in the vicinity of a transition to the compressible phase, in agreement with recent experiments.
The properties of the isotropic incompressible $ u=5/2$ fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state are described by a paired state of composite fermions in zero (effective) magnetic field, with a uniform $p_x+ip_y$ pairing order parameter, which is a non-Abelian topological phase with chiral Majorana and charge modes at the boundary. Recent experiments suggest the existence of a proximate nematic phase at $ u=5/2$. This finding motivates us to consider an inhomogeneous paired state - a $p_x+ip_y$ pair-density-wave (PDW) - whose melting could be the origin of the observed liquid-crystalline phases. This state can viewed as an array of domain and anti-domain walls of the $p_x+i p_y$ order parameter. We show that the nodes of the PDW order parameter, the location of the domain walls (and anti-domain walls) where the order parameter changes sign, support a pair of symmetry-protected counter-propagating Majorana modes. The coupling behavior of the domain wall Majorana modes crucially depends on the interplay of the Fermi energy $E_{F}$ and the PDW pairing energy $E_{textrm{pdw}}$. The analysis of this interplay yields a rich set of topological states. The pair-density-wave order state in paired FQH system provides a fertile setting to study Abelian and non-Abelian FQH phases - as well as transitions thereof - tuned by the strength of the paired liquid crystalline order.