Electron-phonon scattering at the intersection of two Landau levels

Abstract

We predict a double-resonant feature in the magnetic field dependence of the phonon-mediated longitudinal conductivity ${\sigma }_{xx}$ of a two-subband quasi-two-dimensional electron system in a quantizing magnetic field. The two sharp peaks in ${\sigma }_{xx}$ appear when the energy separation between two Landau levels belonging to different size-quantization subbands is favorable for acoustic-phonon transitions. One-phonon and two-phonon mechanisms of electron conductivity are calculated and mutually compared. The phonon-mediated interaction between the intersecting Landau levels is considered and no avoided crossing is found at thermal equilibrium.

13 pages, 8 figures