Spectral weight transfer in a disorder-broadened Landau level

Abstract

In the absence of disorder, the degeneracy of a Landau level (LL) is $N=BA/{\varphi }_0$, where $B$ is the magnetic field, $A$ is the area of the sample and ${\varphi }_0=h/e$ is the magnetic flux quantum. With disorder, localized states appear at the top and bottom of the broadened LL, while states in the center of the LL (the critical region) remain delocalized. This well-known phenomenology is sufficient to explain most aspects of the Integer Quantum Hall Effect (IQHE) [1]. One unnoticed issue is where the new states appear as the magnetic field is increased. Here we demonstrate that they appear predominantly inside the critical region. This leads to a certain ``spectral ordering'' of the localized states that explains the stripes observed in measurements of the local inverse compressibility [2-3], of two-terminal conductance [4], and of Hall and longitudinal resistances [5] without invoking interactions as done in previous work [6-8].

5 pages 3 figures

References in corpus (7)

• The microscopic nature of localization in the quantum Hall effect
• Quantum Hall fluctuations and evidence for charging in the quantum Hall effect
• Compressibility stripes for mesoscopic quantum Hall samples
• Electron correlations and single-particle physics in the Integer Quantum Hall Effect
• Correlated mesoscopic fluctuations in integer quantum Hall transitions
• Electrostatic theory for imaging experiments on local charges in quantum Hall systems
• First-Principles Study of Integer Quantum Hall Transitions in Mesoscopic Samples