Magnetoplasmon Excitations and Spin Density Instabilities in an Integer Quantum Hall System with a Tilted Magnetic Field

TL;DR

This paper investigates magnetoplasmon excitations and potential phase transitions in integer quantum Hall systems under tilted magnetic fields, predicting observable anisotropic modes and exotic symmetry-broken phases.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed theoretical analysis of spin density modes and predicts a possible second order phase transition induced by strong in-plane magnetic fields.

Findings

Magneto-roton minimum appears in spin density mode dispersion.

Strong in-plane fields may lead to zero-energy roton minimum.

Transport anisotropy may be due to skyrmion stripe phase formation.

Abstract

We study the magnetoplasmon collective mode excitations of integer quantum Hall systems in a parabolically confined quantum well nanostructure in the presence of a tilted magnetic field by using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approximation. For even integer filling, we find that the dispersion of a spin density mode has a magneto-roton minimum at finite wavevectors, at a few times 10^6 cm^{-1} for parallel fields of order 1-10 Tesla, only in the direction perpendicular to the in-plane magnetic field, while the mode energy increases monotonously with wavevector parallel to the in-plane magnetic field. When the in-plane magnetic field is strong enough (well above 10 Tesla),we speculate that this roton minimum may reach zero energy, suggesting a possible second order phase transition to a state with broken translational and spin symmetries. We discuss the possibility for observing such parallel field-induced quantum phase transitions. We also derive an expression for the dielectric function within the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approximation and include screening effects in our magnetoplasmon calculation. We discuss several exotic symmetry-broken phases that may be stable in finite parallel fields, and propose that the transport anisotropy, observed recently in parallel field experiments, may be due to the formation of a skyrmion stripe phase predicted in our theory. Our predicted anisotropic finite wavevector suppression, perhaps even a mode-softening leading to the quantum phase transition to the anisotropic phase, in the collective spin excitation mode of the wide well system in the direction transverse to the applied parallel magnetic field should be directly experimentally observable via the inelastic light scattering spectroscopy.