I review recent novel experimental and theoretical advances in the physics of quantum Hall effect bilayers. Of particular interest is a broken symmetry state which optimizes correlations by putting the electrons into a coherent superposition of the two different layers.
We study ring shaped (Corbino) devices made of bilayer two-dimensional electron gases in the total filling factor one quantized Hall phase which is considered to be a coherent BCS-like state of interlayer excitons. Identical Josephson currents are observed at the two edges while only a negligible conductance between them is found. The maximum Josephson current observed at either edge can be controlled by passing a second interlayer Josephson current at the other edge. Due to the large electric resistance between the two edges, the interaction between them can only be mediated by the neutral interlayer excitonic groundstate.
The zero-bias tunneling resonance in quantum Hall bilayer systems is investigated via numerical simulations of the classical two dimensional XY model with a symmetry-breaking field. Disorder is included in the model, and is shown to nucleate strings of overturned spins proliferated through the system, with unpaired vortices and antivortices at their endpoints. This string glass state supports low energy excitations which lead to anomalously large dissipation in tunneling, as observed in experiment. The effect of an in-plane magnetic field is discussed.
We present low temperature transport measurements on dual-gated suspended trilayer graphene in the quantum Hall (QH) regime. We observe QH plateaus at filling factors { u}=-8, -2, 2, 6, and 10, in agreement with the full-parameter tight binding calculations. In high magnetic fields, odd-integer plateaus are also resolved, indicating almost complete lifting of the 12-fold degeneracy of the lowest Landau levels (LL). Under an out-of-plane electric field E, we observe degeneracy breaking and transitions between QH plateaus. Interestingly, depending on its direction, E selectively breaks the LL degeneracies in the electron-doped or hole-doped regimes. Our results underscore the rich interaction-induced phenomena in trilayer graphene.
Band-inverted electron-hole bilayers support quantum spin Hall insulator and exciton condensate phases. We investigate such a bilayer in an external magnetic field. We show that the interlayer correlations lead to formation of a helical quantum Hall exciton condensate state. In contrast to the chiral edge states of the quantum Hall exciton condensate in electron-electron bilayers, existence of the counterpropagating edge modes results in formation of a ground state spin-texture not supporting gapless single-particle excitations. This feature has deep consequences for the low energy behavior of the system. Namely, the charged edge excitations in a sufficiently narrow Hall bar are confined, i.e.~a charge on one of the edges always gives rise to an opposite charge on the other edge. Moreover, we show that magnetic field and gate voltages allow to control confinement-deconfinement transition of charged edge excitations, which can be probed with nonlocal conductance. Confinement-deconfinement transitions are of great interest, not least because of their possible significance in shedding light on the confinement problem of quarks.
Interlayer tunneling measurements in the strongly correlated bilayer quantized Hall phase at $ u_T=1$ are reported. The maximum, or critical current for tunneling at $ u_T=1$, is shown to be a well-defined global property of the coherent phase, insensitive to extrinsic circuit effects and the precise configuration used to measure it, but also exhibiting a surprising scaling behavior with temperature. Comparisons between the experimentally observed tunneling characteristics and a recent theory are favorable at high temperatures, but not at low temperatures where the tunneling closely resembles the dc Josephson effect. The zero-bias tunneling resistance becomes extremely small at low temperatures, vastly less than that observed at zero magnetic field, but nonetheless remains finite. The temperature dependence of this tunneling resistance is similar to that of the ordinary in-plane resistivity of the quantum Hall phase.