Semiclassical theory of the tunneling anomaly in partially spin-polarized compressible quantum Hall states

Abstract

Electron tunneling into a system with strong interactions is known to exhibit an anomaly, in which the tunneling conductance vanishes continuously at low energy due to many-body interactions. Recent measurements have probed this anomaly in a quantum Hall bilayer of the half-filled Landau level, and shown that the anomaly apparently gets stronger as the half-filled Landau level is increasingly spin polarized. Motivated by this result, we construct a semiclassical hydrodynamic theory of the tunneling anomaly in terms of the charge-spreading action associated with tunneling between two copies of the Halperin-Lee-Read state with partial spin polarization. This theory is complementary to our recent work (arXiv:1709.06091) where the electron spectral function was computed directly using an instanton-based approach. Our results show that the experimental observation cannot be understood within conventional theories of the tunneling anomaly, in which the spreading of the injected charge is driven by the mean-field Coulomb energy. However, we identify a qualitatively new regime, in which the mean-field Coulomb energy is effectively quenched and the tunneling anomaly is dominated by the finite compressibility of the composite Fermion liquid.

24 pages, 2 figures; Final published version

References in corpus (6)

• Particle-Hole Symmetry in the Fermion-Chern-Simons and Dirac Descriptions of a Half-Filled Landau Level
• Fermi wave vector for the non-fully spin polarized composite-fermion Fermi sea
• Spin Transition in the Half-Filled Landau Level
• Tunnel transport and interlayer excitons in bilayer fractional quantum Hall systems
• Spin and the Coulomb Gap in the Half-Filled Lowest Landau Level
• Effect of magnetization on the tunneling anomaly in compressible quantum Hall states

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Precursors to Exciton Condensation in Quantum Hall Bilayers
• A magnetically-induced Coulomb gap in graphene due to electron-electron interactions
• Effect of magnetization on the tunneling anomaly in compressible quantum Hall states
• Interlayer Interactions and the Fermi Energy of Bilayer Composite Fermion Metals
• Tunneling density of states, correlation energy, and spin polarization in the fractional quantum Hall regime