A highly non-thermal electron distribution is generated when quantum Hall edge states originating from sources at different potentials meet at a quantum point contact. The relaxation of this distribution to a stationary form as a function of distance
downstream from the contact has been observed in recent experiments [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 056803 (2010)]. Here we present an exact treatment of a minimal model for the system at filling factor u=2, with results that account well for the observations.
We study equilibration of quantum Hall edge states at integer filling factors, motivated by experiments involving point contacts at finite bias. Idealising the experimental situation and extending the notion of a quantum quench, we consider time evol
ution from an initial non-equilibrium state in a translationally invariant system. We show that electron interactions bring the system into a steady state at long times. Strikingly, this state is not a thermal one: its properties depend on the full functional form of the initial electron distribution, and not simply on the initial energy density. Further, we demonstrate that measurements of the tunneling density of states at long times can yield either an over-estimate or an under-estimate of the energy density, depending on details of the analysis, and discuss this finding in connection with an apparent energy loss observed experimentally. More specifically, we treat several separate cases: for filling factor u=1 we discuss relaxation due to finite-range or Coulomb interactions between electrons in the same channel, and for filling factor u=2 we examine relaxation due to contact interactions between electrons in different channels. In both instances we calculate analytically the long-time asymptotics of the single-particle correlation function. These results are supported by an exact solution at arbitrary time for the problem of relaxation at u=2 from an initial state in which the two channels have electron distributions that are both thermal but with unequal temperatures, for which we also examine the tunneling density of states.
We study theoretically electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometers built from integer quantum Hall edge states, showing that the results of recent experiments can be understood in terms of multiparticle interference effects. These experiments probe the v
isibility of Aharonov-Bohm (AB) oscillations in differential conductance as an interferometer is driven out of equilibrium by an applied bias, finding a lobe pattern in visibility as a function of voltage. We calculate the dependence on voltage of the visibility and the phase of AB oscillations at zero temperature, taking into account long range interactions between electrons in the same edge for interferometers operating at a filling fraction $ u=1$. We obtain an exact solution via bosonization for models in which electrons interact only when they are inside the interferometer. This solution is non-perturbative in the tunneling probabilities at quantum point contacts. The results match observations in considerable detail provided the transparency of the incoming contact is close to one-half: the variation in visibility with bias voltage consists of a series of lobes of decreasing amplitude, and the phase of the AB-fringes is practically constant inside the lobes but jumps by $pi$ at the minima of the visibility. We discuss in addition the consequences of approximations made in other recent treatments of this problem. We also formulate perturbation theory in the interaction strength and use this to study the importance of interactions that are not internal to the interferometer.
We examine bosons hopping on a one-dimensional lattice in the presence of a random potential at zero temperature. Bogoliubov excitations of the Bose-Einstein condensate formed under such conditions are localized, with the localization length divergin
g at low frequency as $ell(omega)sim 1/omega^alpha$. We show that the well known result $alpha=2$ applies only for sufficiently weak random potential. As the random potential is increased beyond a certain strength, $alpha$ starts decreasing. At a critical strength of the potential, when the system of bosons is at the transition from a superfluid to an insulator, $alpha=1$. This result is relevant for understanding the behavior of the atomic Bose-Einstein condensates in the presence of random potential, and of the disordered Josephson junction arrays.
