Redistributing Chern numbers of Landau subbands: tight-binding electrons under staggered-modulated magnetic fields

Abstract

We investigate the magneto-transport properties of electrons on a square lattice under a magnetic field with the alternate flux strength $\varphi \pm \Delta \varphi$ in neighboring plaquettes. A new peculiar behavior of the Hall conductance has been found and is robust against weak disorder: if $\varphi =\frac{p}{2N}\times 2\pi$ ($p$ and $2N$ are coprime integers) is fixed, the Chern numbers of Landau subbands will be redistributed between neighboring pairs and hence the total quantized Hall conductance exhibits a direct transition by $\pm N{e}^2/h$ at critical fillings when $\Delta \varphi$ is increased from 0 up to a critical value $\Delta {\varphi }_c$. This effect can be an experimental probe of the staggered-flux phase.

5 pages, 5 figures, 1 table

Cited by in corpus (1)

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