Charge ordering and interlayer phase coherence in quantum Hall superlattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which interlayer phase coherence and charge ordering occur in multilayer quantum Hall systems, revealing stability regimes depending on the number of layers and interlayer distance.

Contribution

It demonstrates that interlayer phase coherence is limited to adjacent layer pairs and identifies stability conditions for systems with varying layer counts and interlayer distances.

Findings

Interlayer phase coherence exists only between adjacent layers.

Stability conditions depend on the number of layers and interlayer distance.

For large N, the stability interval at small d disappears.

Abstract

The possibility of the existence of states with a spontaneous interlayer phase coherence in multilayer electron systems in a high perpendicular to the layers magnetic field is investigated. It is shown that phase coherence can be established in such systems only within individual pairs of adjacent layers, while such coherence does not exist between layers of different pairs. The conditions for stability of the state with interlayer phase coherence against transition to a charge-ordered state are determined. It is shown that in the system with the number of layers N\leq 10 these conditions are satisfied at any value of the interlayer distance d. For N>10 there are two intervals of stability: at sufficiently large and at sufficiently small d. For N\to \infty the stability interval in the region of small d vanishes