Conductances, Conductance Fluctuations, and Level Statistics on the Surface of Multilayer Quantum Hall States

TL;DR

This paper investigates the surface conductance, fluctuations, and level statistics of multilayer quantum Hall states, introducing a new numerical method and analyzing critical transport properties and phase transitions.

Contribution

It presents a stable large-scale conductance calculation algorithm and provides detailed analysis of conductance fluctuations and level statistics in multilayer quantum Hall systems.

Findings

Conductance fluctuations match supersymmetric nonlinear sigma-model predictions.

Identification of coexistence of metallic and insulating level statistics in crossover regimes.

Finite range level repulsion characterizes the transition between metallic and insulating behaviors.

Abstract

The transport properties on the two-dimensional surface of coupled multilayer heterostructures are studied in the integer quantum Hall states. We emphasize the criticality of the surface state and the phase coherent transport properties in the thermodynamic limit. A new, stable numerical algorithm for large scale conductance calculations in the transfer matrix approach is discussed in detail. It is then applied to a directed network model describing the quantum mechanical tunneling and impurity scattering of the multilayer edge states. We calculate the two-probe conductance in the direction parallel to the external magnetic field, its fluctuations and statistical distributions as a function of the interlayer tunneling strength. Using finite size scaling, the asymptotic scaling functions of the ensemble averaged conductance and the conductance fluctuations are calculated for a fixed aspect ratio and found to be in remarkable agreement with the analytical results obtained using the supersymmetric nonlinear $\sigma$-model approach. The conductance distribution is determined in the quasi-one-dimensional metallic, insulating, as well as the crossover regime where comparisons are made to that at the single-layer quantum Hall transition. We present, for the first time, a detailed study of the level statistics in the eigenvalue spectrum of the transfer matrix. Coexistence of metallic and insulating statistics is observed in the crossover regime, which is attributed to the emergence of a finite range level repulsion in the crossover regime, separating the metallic (Wigner-surmise) behavior at small level spacings from the insulating (uncorrelated or Poisson) behavior at large level spacings.