Effect of disorder and electron-phonon interaction on interlayer tunnelling current in quantum Hall bilayer

TL;DR

This paper investigates how disorder and electron-phonon interactions influence the interlayer tunnelling current in quantum Hall bilayers, revealing broadened resonant features and non-monotonic effects related to magnetic field and well geometry.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of disorder and electron-phonon effects on tunnelling current, aligning theoretical predictions with experimental observations.

Findings

Disorder and electron-phonon interactions cause broadening of the tunnelling resonance.

Broadening due to electron-phonon coupling varies non-monotonically with in-plane magnetic field.

Static disorder has a minimal effect on broadening within experimental conditions.

Abstract

We study the transport properties of the quantum Hall bilayers systems looking closely at the effect that disorder and electron-phonon interaction have on the interlayer tunnelling current in the presence of an in-plane magnetic field $B_\parallel$. We find that it is important to take into account the effect of disorder and electron-phonon interactions in order to predict a finite current at a finite voltage when an in-plane magnetic field is present. We find a broadened resonant feature in the tunnelling current as a function of bias voltage, in qualitative agreement with experiments. We also find the broadening of this resonant feature due to electron-phonon coupling has a non-monotonic dependence on $B_\parallel$, related to the geometry of the double quantum well. We also compare this with the broadening effect due to spatial fluctuations of the tunnelling amplitude. We conclude that such static disorder provides only very weak broadening of the resonant feature in the experimental range.