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arXiv:cond-mat/0303324 · Physical review. B, Condensed matter

Spontaneous symmetry breaking and exotic quantum orders in integer quantum Hall systems under a tilted magnetic field

Daw-Wei Wang, Eugene Demler, S. Das Sarma

Published Oct 8, 2003• 26 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We use the microscopic Hartree-Fock approximation to investigate various quantum phase transitions associated with possible spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by a tilted magnetic field in the integral quantum Hall (QH) regime of wide parabolic wells and zero width double well (bilayer) systems. Spin, isospin (associated with the layer index in the bilayer systems), and orbital dynamics all play important roles in the quantum phase transitions being studied. We propose a general class of variational wave functions that describe several types of parity, spin, and translational symmetry breaking, including spin and charge density wave phases. In wide well systems at odd filling factors, we find a many-body state of broken parity symmetry for weak in-plane magnetic fields and an isospin skyrmion stripe phase, which simultaneously has isospin and charge modulation, for strong in-plane fields. In wide well systems at even filling factors, we find direct first order transitions between simple (un)polarized QH states, but also several many-body states that are only slightly higher in energy (within the Hartree-Fock theory) than the ground state in strong in-plane field region. We suggest that going beyond the approximations used in this paper one may be able to stabilize such many-body phases with broken symmetries (most likely the skyrmion stripe phase). In a bilayer system at the filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=4N\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1,$ where N is an integer, we obtain an isospin spiral stripe phase in addition to the known (in)commensurate phases and the stripe phase without isospin winding. We do not find a charge or spin density wave instability in the bilayer system at $\ensuremath{\nu}=4N+2,$ except for the known commensurate canted antiferromagnetic phase. Zero temperature quantum phase diagrams for these systems are calculated in the parameter regime of experimental interest. We discuss the symmetry properties of our predicted quantum phase diagrams and give a unified picture of these novel many-body phases. We point out how quantum level crossing phenomena in many situations (tuned by the applied tilted magnetic field) may lead to interesting quantum phases and transitions among them.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.68.165303

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We use the microscopic Hartree-Fock approximation to investigate various quantum phase transitions associated with possible spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by a tilted magnetic field in the integral quantum Hall (QH) regime of wide parabolic wells and zero width double well (bilayer) systems. Spin, isospin (associated with the layer index in the bilayer systems), and orbital dynamics all play important roles in the quantum phase transitions being studied. We propose a general class of variational wave functions that describe several types of parity, spin, and translational symmetry breaking, including spin and charge density wave phases. In wide well systems at odd filling factors, we find a many-body state of broken parity symmetry for weak in-plane magnetic fields and an isospin skyrmion stripe phase, which simultaneously has isospin and charge modulation, for strong in-plane fields. In wide well systems at even filling factors, we find direct first order transitions between simple (un)polarized QH states, but also several many-body states that are only slightly higher in energy (within the Hartree-Fock theory) than the ground state in strong in-plane field region. We suggest that going beyond the approximations used in this paper one may be able to stabilize such many-body phases with broken symmetries (most likely the skyrmion stripe phase). In a bilayer system at the filling factor \ensuremathν=4N\ifmmode±\else\textpm\fi1,\ensuremath{\nu}=4N\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1,\ensuremathν=4N\ifmmode±\else\textpm\fi1, where N is an integer, we obtain an isospin spiral stripe phase in addition to the known (in)commensurate phases and the stripe phase without isospin winding. We do not find a charge or spin density wave instability in the bilayer system at \ensuremathν=4N+2,\ensuremath{\nu}=4N+2,\ensuremathν=4N+2, except for the known commensurate canted antiferromagnetic phase. Zero temperature quantum phase diagrams for these systems are calculated in the parameter regime of experimental interest. We discuss the symmetry properties of our predicted quantum phase diagrams and give a unified picture of these novel many-body phases. We point out how quantum level crossing phenomena in many situations (tuned by the applied tilted magnetic field) may lead to interesting quantum phases and transitions among them.
We use the time-dependent Hartree Fock approximation to study the collective-mode spectra of $\ensuremath{\nu}=2$ quantum Hall bilayers in tilted magnetic fields, allowing for charge imbalance as well as tunneling between the two layers. In a previous companion paper to this work, we studied the zero-temperature global phase diagram of this system, which was found to include symmetric and ferromagnetic phases as well as a first-order transition between two canted phases with spontaneously broken U(1) symmetry. We further found that this first-order transition line ends in a quantum critical point within the canted region. In the current work, we study the excitation spectra of all of these phases and pay particular attention to the behavior of the collective modes near the phase transitions. We find, most interestingly, that the first-order transition between the two canted phases is signaled by a near softening of a magnetoroton minimum. Many of the collective-mode features explored here should be accessible experimentally in light-scattering experiments.
Quantum Hall systems have a one-body energy spectrum consisting of dispersion-less Landau levels. Electron-electron interactions thus dominate in partially filled Landau levels, which exhibit a myriad of strongly correlated phases such as quantum hall ferromagnets and fractional quantum Hall phases. We study two examples of these phenomena. In the first project, we explore the ground state of a system with an interface between two semi-infinite regions with fillings ν= 4 and ν= 3 respectively. The width of the interface can be controlled by varying the background potential, which provides an additional tuning parameter. For a certain range of interaction strengths, the ν= 4 bulk is unpolarized whereas the ν= 3 bulk is fully polarized. In the parameter space spanned by the interaction strength and width of the interface, we find two phases at the interface. Phase A has spin as a good quantum number, and the long-wavelength spin edge excitations are gapped. In phase B, spin rotation symmetry is spontaneously broken at the mean-field level. Using symmetry arguments we find the effective theory near the interface of phase B. This effective theory is known to have gapless long-wavelength spin excitations. In the second project, we study the ground state of a tunnel-decoupled double-layer graphene system when both layers are undoped. We find a simple Hamiltonian in the continuum limit from symmetries of the system. Using the Hartree-Fock approximation we find a state with inter-layer coherence with broken layer U(1) symmetry. This phase becomes magnetized in presence of a non-zero Zeeman field. A first-order phase transition can be driven from the ferromagnetic phase to the magnetized inter-layer coherent phase by increasing the Zeeman field. We predict the number of gapless modes in the bulk.
We present details of earlier studies [Zheng et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 310 (1997) and Das Sarma et al., 79, 917 (1997)] and additional results on double-layer quantum Hall systems at a total filling $\ensuremath{\nu}=2{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{1}$, where a single layer at filling ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{1}$ forms a ferromagnetic, fully spin-polarized, gapped incompressible quantum Hall state. For the case ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{1}=1$, a detailed Hartree-Fock analysis is carried out on a realistic, microscopic Hamiltonian. Apart from the state continuously connected to the ground state of two well-separated layers, we find two double-layer quantum Hall phases: one with a finite interlayer antiferromagnetic spin ordering in the plane orthogonal to the applied field (the ``canted'' state), and the other a spin singlet. The quantum transitions between the various quantum Hall states are continuous, and are signaled by the softening of collective intersubband spin-density excitations. For the case of general ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{1}$, closely related results are obtained by a semi-phenomenological continuum quantum field theory description of the low-lying spin excitations using a nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ model. Because of its broken symmetry, the canted phase supports a linearly dispersing Goldstone mode and has a finite-temperature Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. We present results on the form of the phase diagram, the magnitude of the canted order parameter, the collective excitation dispersions, the specific heat, the form of the dynamic light-scattering spectrum at finite temperature, and the Kosterlitz-Thouless critical temperature. Our findings are consistent with recent experimental results.
We investigated the behavior of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states in a two-dimensional electron system with layer thickness and an in-plane magnetic field. Our comparisons across various filling factors within the first Landau level revealed a crucial observation. A slight in-plane magnetic field specifically enhances the nematic order of the ν=7/3ν= 7/3ν=7/3 FQH state. For this particular filling, through calculating the energy gap, the Ising nematic order parameter, the pair-correlation function, and the static structure factor, we observed that as the in-plane magnetic field increases, the system first enters into an anisotropic FQH phase without closing the spectrum gap, then the FQH nematic (FQHN) phase after neutral gap closing. The system eventually enters a gapless one-dimensional charge density wave (CDW) phase for a large in-plane field. We thus provide a full phase diagram of the ν=7/3ν= 7/3ν=7/3 state in a tilted magnetic field, demonstrating the existence of the FQHN, which aligns with recent resonant inelastic light scattering (RILS) experimental observations.
We present an exact diagonalization study of bilayer quantum Hall systems at filling factor nu = 2 in the spherical geometry. We find the high-Zeeman-coupling phase boundary of the broken symmetry canted antiferromagnet is given exactly by previous Hartree-Fock mean-field theories, but that the state's stability at weak Zeeman coupling has been qualitatively overestimated. In the absence of interlayer tunneling, degeneracies occur between total spin multiplets due to the Hamiltonian's invariance under independent spin rotations in top and bottom two-dimensional electron layers.
We discuss the orbital effect of a tilted magnetic field on the quantum Hall effect in parabolic quantum wells. Many-body states realized at the fractional 13\frac{1}{3}31​ and 12\frac{1}{2}21​ filling of the second electronic subband are studied using finite-size exact diagonalization. In both cases, we obtain the phase diagram consisting of a fractional quantum Hall fluid phase that persists for moderate tilts, and eventually undergoes a direct transition to the stripe phase. It is shown that tilting of the field probes the geometrical degree of freedom of fractional quantum Hall fluids, and can be partly related to the effect of band-mass anisotropy.