Anisotropic Transport of Quantum Hall Meron-Pair Excitations

TL;DR

This paper investigates the anisotropic transport properties of Meron-pair excitations in double-layer quantum Hall systems, proposing an experiment to observe angle-dependent effects caused by their linear confinement.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup to detect anisotropic transport of Meron pairs and analyzes their angle-dependent behavior in quantum Hall systems.

Findings

Strong angle-dependent transport observed in simulations

Meron pairs exhibit linear confinement and anisotropic alignment

Experimental signatures of Meron-pair excitations discussed

Abstract

Double-layer quantum Hall systems at total filling factor $\nu_T=1$ can exhibit a commensurate-incommensurate phase transition driven by a magnetic field $B_{\parallel}$ oriented parallel to the layers. Within the commensurate phase, the lowest charge excitations are believed to be linearly-confined Meron pairs, which are energetically favored to align with $B_{\parallel}$. In order to investigate this interesting object, we propose a gated double-layer Hall bar experiment in which $B_{\parallel}$ can be rotated with respect to the direction of a constriction. We demonstrate the strong angle-dependent transport due to the anisotropic nature of linearly-confined Meron pairs and discuss how it would be manifested in experiment.