Neutral Collective Modes in Spin-Polarized Fractional Quantum Hall States at Filling Factors 1/3, 2/5, 3/7, and 4/9

TL;DR

This paper analyzes collective spin modes in fractional quantum Hall states at various filling factors, predicting new higher energy modes and their dependence on quantum well thickness, with implications for experimental detection.

Contribution

It provides a detailed theoretical study of collective modes, including new predictions of higher energy excitations and finite thickness effects in spin-polarized fractional quantum Hall states.

Findings

Predicted additional higher energy modes at different filling factors.

Found that spin-conserving modes do not merge at certain filling factors.

Identified spin-rotons indicating instability of fully polarized ground states.

Abstract

We determine the lowest and higher order collective modes in both spin-conserving and spin-reversed sectors by calculating energy differences of the appropriate linear combinations of different levels of composite-fermion-excitons and the fully spin-polarized ground states at filling factors $\nu=1/3$, 2/5, 3/7, and 4/9. Apart from providing the detailed study of previously reported modes that have also been observed in the experiments, we predict additional higher energy modes at different filling factors. The lowest and the next higher spin-conserving modes have equal number of "magneto-rotons" and the number is the same as the number of filled effective Landau-like levels of composite fermions. The higher energy modes at $\nu =1/3$ merge with the lowest mode at long-wavelength. The spin-conserving modes do not merge at other filling factors. Apart from showing zero-energy spin-wave mode at zero momentum, thanks to Larmor's theorem, the lowest spin-reversed modes at the ferromagnetic ground states of $\nu=2/5$, 3/7, and 4/9 display one or more "spin-rotons" at negative energies signalling the unstable fully polarized ground states at sufficiently small Zeeman energies. The high energy spin-reversed modes also have spin-rotons but at positive energies. The energies of these excitations depend on the finite width of the quantum well as the Coulomb interaction gets screened. We determine finite thickness correction to the Coulomb interaction by the standard method of local density approximation and use them to calculate the critical energies such as rotons, long-wavelength, and short-wavelength modes which are detectable in inelastic light scattering experiments.