No Arabic abstract
We investigate the origin of the resistance fluctuations of mesoscopic samples, near transitions between Quantum Hall plateaus. These fluctuations have been recently observed experimentally by E. Peled et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 246802 (2003); ibid 90, 236802 (2003); Phys. Rev. B 69, R241305 (2004)]. We perform realistic first-principles simulations using a six-terminal geometry and sample sizes similar to those of real devices, to model the actual experiment. We present the theory and implementation of these simulations, which are based on the linear response theory for non-interacting electrons. The Hall and longitudinal resistances extracted from the Landauer formula exhibit all the observed experimental features. We give a unified explanation for the three regimes with distinct types of fluctuations observed experimentally, based on a simple generalization of the Landauer-Buttiker model. The transport is shown to be determined by the interplay between tunneling and chiral currents. We identify the central part of the transition, at intermediate filling factors, as the critical region where the localization length is larger than the sample size.
The longitudinal resistivity at transitions between integer quantum Hall states in two-dimensional electrons confined to AlAs quantum wells is found to depend on the spin orientation of the partially-filled Landau level in which the Fermi energy resides. The resistivity can be enhanced by an order of magnitude as the spin orientation of this energy level is aligned with the majority spin. We discuss possible causes and suggest a new explanation for spike-like features observed at the edges of quantum Hall minima near Landau level crossings.
We present an experiment where the quantum coherence in the edge states of the integer quantum Hall regime is tuned with a decoupling gate. The coherence length is determined by measuring the visibility of quantum interferences in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer as a function of temperature, in the quantum Hall regime at filling factor two. The temperature dependence of the coherence length can be varied by a factor of two. The strengthening of the phase coherence at finite temperature is shown to arise from a reduction of the coupling between co-propagating edge states. This opens the way for a strong improvement of the phase coherence of Quantum Hall systems. The decoupling gate also allows us to investigate how inter-edge state coupling influence the quantum interferences dependence on the injection bias. We find that the finite bias visibility can be decomposed into two contributions: a Gaussian envelop which is surprisingly insensitive to the coupling, and a beating component which, on the contrary, is strongly affected by the coupling.
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 study the spectral properties of infinite rectangular quantum graphs in the presence of a magnetic field. We study how these properties are affected when three-dimensionality is considered, in particular, the chaological properties. We then establish the quantization of the Hall transverse conductivity for these systems. This quantization is obtained by relating the transverse conductivity to topological invariants. The different integer values of the Hall conductivity are explicitly computed for an anisotropic diffusion system which leads to fractal phase diagrams.
We present a calculation for the second moment of the local density of states in a model of a two-dimensional quantum dot array near the quantum Hall transition. The quantum dot array model is a realistic adaptation of the lattice model for the quantum Hall transition in the two-dimensional electron gas in an external magnetic field proposed by Ludwig, Fisher, Shankar and Grinstein. We make use of a Dirac fermion representation for the Green functions in the presence of fluctuations for the quantum dot energy levels. A saddle-point approximation yields non-perturbative results for the first and second moments of the local density of states, showing interesting fluctuation behaviour near the quantum Hall transition. To our knowledge we discuss here one of the first analytic characterizations of chaotic behaviour for a two-dimensional mesoscopic structure. The connection with possible experimental investigations of the local density of states in the quantum dot array structures (by means of NMR Knight-shift or single-electron-tunneling techniques) and our work is also established.