Parity Violation in Aharonov-Bohm Systems: The Spontaneous Hall Effect

Abstract

We show how macroscopic manifestations of $P$ (and $T$) symmetry breaking can arise in a simple system subject to Aharonov-Bohm interactions. Specifically, we study the conductivity of a gas of charged particles moving through a dilute array of flux tubes. The interaction of the electrons with the flux tubes is taken to be of a purely Aharonov-Bohm type. We find that the system exhibits a non-zero transverse conductivity, i.e., a spontaneous Hall effect. This is in contrast with the fact that the cross sections for both scattering and bremsstrahlung (soft photon emission) of a single electron from a flux tube are invariant under reflections. We argue that the asymmetry in the conductivity coefficients arises from many-body effects. On the other hand, the transverse conductivity has the same dependence on universal constants that appears in the Quantum Hall Effect, a result that we relate to the validity of the Mean Field approximation.

12 pages (4 figures available upon request), RevTex, EHU-FT-93/10

References in corpus (5)

• Aharonov-Bohm Scattering, Contact Interactions and Scale Invariance
• Pressure in Chern-Simons Field Theory to Three-Loop Order
• Three-Loop Calculation of the Anyonic Full Cluster Expansion
• Scattering From a Two Dimensional Array of Flux Tubes: A Study of The Validity of Mean Field Theory
• Parity violation and the mean field approximation for the anyon gas

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Paraxial propagation of a quantum charge in a random magnetic field
• Hall Conductivity for Two Dimensional Magnetic Systems