Anisotropic Quantum Hall Droplets

Abstract

We study two-dimensional (2D) droplets of noninteracting electrons in a strong magnetic field, placed in a confining potential with arbitrary shape. Using semiclassical methods adapted to the lowest Landau level, we obtain near-Gaussian energy eigenstates that are localized on level curves of the potential and have a position-dependent height. This one-particle insight allows us to deduce explicit formulas for expectation values of local many-body observables, such as density and current, in the thermodynamic limit. In particular, correlations along the edge are long-ranged and inhomogeneous. As we show, this is consistent with the system's universal low-energy description as a free 1D chiral conformal field theory of edge modes, known from earlier works in simple geometries. A delicate interplay between radial and angular dependencies of eigenfunctions ultimately ensures that the theory is homogeneous in terms of the canonical angle variable of the potential, despite its apparent inhomogeneity in terms of more naïve angular coordinates. Finally, we propose a scheme to measure the anisotropy by subjecting the droplet to microwave radiation; we compute the corresponding absorption rate and show that it depends on the droplet's shape and the waves' polarization. These results, both local and global, are likely to be observable in solid-state systems or quantum simulators of 2D electron gases with a high degree of control on the confining potential.

31 pages, 9 figures. v2: minor improvements, new appendix on subleading corrections. v3: new section (+ appendix) on microwave absorption, references added, minor updates. v4: final published version

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Universality in the number variance and counting statistics of the real and symplectic Ginibre ensemble
• Noncommutative Geometry and Deformation Quantization in the Quantum Hall Fluids with Inhomogeneous Magnetic Fields
• Adiabatic Deformations of Quantum Hall Droplets
• Circular Dichroism on the Edge of Quantum Hall Systems: From Many-Body Chern Number to Anisotropy Measurements
• Equilibrium measures for higher dimensional rotationally symmetric Riesz gases
• Spin fractionalization at the edge of quantum Hall fluids induced by bulk quasiparticles
• Linear statistics at the microscopic scale for the 2D Coulomb gas
• Berry Phases in the Bosonization of Nonlinear Edge Modes
• Quantum Hall edges beyond the plasma analogy