Momentum resolved tunneling into the Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian edges

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method using momentum resolved tunneling to distinguish between Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states at the edges of fractional quantum Hall systems, and to detect edge reconstruction effects.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical calculation of edge spectral functions and demonstrates how to differentiate between the Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states experimentally.

Findings

Distinct spectral signatures for Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian edges

Method to identify the realized state at filling factor 5/2

Potential detection of edge reconstruction effects

Abstract

We calculate the electron spectral functions at the edges of the Moore-Read Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian fractional quantum Hall states, in the clean limit. We show that their qualitative differences can be probed using momentum resolved tunneling, thus providing a method to unambiguously distinguish which one is realized in the fractional quantum Hall state observed at filling factor $\nu=5/2$. We further argue that edge reconstruction, which may be less important in the first excited Landau level (LL) than in the lowest LL, can also be detected this way if present.