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In an ultrathin topological insulator (TI) film, a hybridization gap opens in the TI surface states, and the system is expected to become either a trivial insulator or a quantum spin Hall insulator when the chemical potential is within the hybridization gap. Here we show, however, that these insulating states are destroyed by the presence of a large and long-range-correlated disorder potential, which converts the expected insulator into a metal. We perform transport measurements in ultrathin, dual-gated topological insulator films as a function of temperature, gate voltage, and magnetic field, and we observe a metallic-like, non-quantized conductivity, which exhibits a weak antilocalization-like cusp at the low magnetic field and gives way to a nonsaturating linear magnetoresistance at large field. We explain these results by considering the disordered network of electron- and hole-type puddles induced by charged impurities. We argue theoretically that such disorder can produce an insulator-to-metal transition as a function of increasing disorder strength, and we derive a condition on the band gap and the impurity concentration necessary to observe the insulating state. We also explain the linear magnetoresistance in terms of strong spatial fluctuations of the local conductivity, using both numerical simulations and a theoretical scaling argument., Comment: 13 pages, 14 figures

Although numerical studies modeling the quantum hall effect at filling fraction $5/2$ predict either the Pfaffian (Pf) or its particle hole conjugate, the anti-Pfaffian (aPf) state, recent experiments appear to favor a quantized thermal hall conductivity with quantum number $K=5/2$ , rather than the value $K=7/2$ or $K=3/2$ expected for the Pf or aPF state, respectively. While a particle hole symmetric topological order (the PH-Pfaffian) would be consistent with the experiments, this state is believed to be energetically unfavorable in a homogenous system. Here we study the effects of disorder that are assumed to locally nucleate domains of Pf and aPf. When the disorder is relatively weak and the size of domains is relatively large, we find that when the electrical Hall conductance is on the quantized plateau with $\sigma_{xy} = (5/2)(e^2/h)$, the value of $K$ can be only 7/2 or 3/2, with a possible first-order-like transition between them as the magnetic field is varied. However, for sufficiently strong disorder an intermediate state might appear, which we analyze within a network model of the domain walls. Predominantly, we find a thermal metal phase, where $K$ varies continuously and the longitudinal thermal conductivity is non-zero, while the electrical Hall conductivity remains quantized at $(5/2)e^2/h$. However, in a restricted parameter range we find a thermal insulator with $K=5/2$, a disorder stabilized phase which is adiabatically connected to the PH-Pfaffian. We discuss a possible scenario to rationalize these special values of parameters., Comment: Slightly updated version with additional references, 12 pages + references, 9 figures

We present experimental data and associated theory for correlations in a series of experiments involving repeated Landau-Zener sweeps through the crossing point of a singlet state and a spin aligned triplet state in a GaAs double quantum dot containing two conduction electrons, which are loaded in the singlet state before each sweep, and the final spin is recorded after each sweep. The experiments reported here measure correlations on time scales from 4 $\mu$s to 2 ms. When the magnetic field is aligned in a direction such that spin-orbit coupling cannot cause spin flips, the correlation spectrum has prominent peaks centered at zero frequency and at the differences of the Larmor frequencies of the nuclei, on top of a frequency-independent background. When the spin-orbit field is relevant, there are additional peaks, centered at the frequencies of the individual species. A theoretical model which neglects the effects of high-frequency charge noise correctly predicts the positions of the observed peaks, and gives a reasonably accurate prediction of the size of the frequency-independent background, but gives peak areas that are larger than the observed areas by a factor of two or more. The observed peak widths are roughly consistent with predictions based on nuclear dephasing times of the order of 60 $\mu$s. However, there is extra weight at the lowest observed frequencies, which suggests the existence of residual correlations on the scale of 2 ms. We speculate on the source of these discrepancies., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

We consider an annular superconductor-insulator-superconductor Josephson-junction, with the insulator being a double layer of electron and holes at Abelian fractional quantum Hall states of identical fillings. When the two superconductors gap out the edge modes, the system has a topological ground state degeneracy in the thermodynamic limit akin to the fractional quantum Hall degeneracy on a torus. In the quasi-one-dimensional limit, where the width of the insulator becomes small, the ground state energies are split. We discuss several implications of the topological degeneracy that survive the crossover to the quasi-one-dimensional limit. In particular, the Josephson effect shows a $2\pi d$-periodicity, where $d$ is the ground state degeneracy in the 2 dimensional limit. We find that at special values of the relative phase between the two superconductors there are protected crossing points in which the degeneracy is not completely lifted. These features occur also if the insulator is a time-reversal-invariant fractional topological insulator. We describe the latter using a construction based on coupled wires. Furthermore, when the superconductors are replaced by systems with an appropriate magnetic order that gap the edges via a spin-flipping backscattering, the Josephson effect is replaced by a spin Josephson effect.

The electron number parity of the ground state of a semiconductor nanowire proximity coupled to a bulk superconductor can alternate between the quantized values $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1$ if parameters such as the wire length $L$, the chemical potential $\ensuremath{\mu}$, or the magnetic field $B$ are varied inside the topological superconductor phase. The parity jumps, which may be interpreted as changes in the occupancy of the fermion state formed from the pair of Majorana modes at opposite ends of the wire, are accompanied by jumps $\ensuremath{\delta}N$ in the charge of the nanowire, whose values decrease exponentially with the wire length. We study theoretically the dependence of $\ensuremath{\delta}N$ on system parameters, and compare the locations in the $\ensuremath{\mu}\text{\ensuremath{-}}B$ plane of parity jumps when the nanowire is or is not proximity coupled to a bulk superconductor. We show that, despite the fact that the wave functions of the Majorana modes are localized near the two ends of the wire, the charge-density jumps have spatial distributions that are essentially uniform along the wire length, being proportional to the product of the two Majorana wave functions. We explain how charge measurements, say by an external single-electron transistor, could reveal these effects. Whereas existing experimental methods require direct contact to the wire for tunneling measurements, charge sensing avoids this issue and provides an orthogonal measurement to confirm recent experimental developments. Furthermore, by comparing density of states measurements which show Majorana features at the wire ends with the uniformly distributed charge measurements, one can rule out alternative explanations for earlier results. We shed light on a parameter regime for these wire-superconductor hybrid systems, and propose a related experiment to measure spin density.

The transresistance and Hall transresistance of dirty two-dimensional bilayer systems in the presence of tunneling bridges (pinholes) are studied theoretically. We find, at weak magnetic field, a nonzero Hall transresistance. In a geometry where the pinholes are concentrated in the middle of the sample, a quantum process gives the dominant contribution to both the ordinary transresistance and the Hall transresistance. Arising from the interplay between Coulomb repulsion, disorder, and tunneling, the quantum contribution increases in a singular way as the temperature decreases.

In this paper we study the relation between the conventional Fermion-Chern-Simons (FCS) theory of the half-filled Landau level (nu=1/2), and alternate descriptions that are based on the notion of neutral quasi-particles that carry electric dipole moments. We have previously argued that these two approaches are equivalent, and that e.g., the finite compressibility obtained in the FCS approach is also obtained from the alternate approach, provided that one properly takes into account a peculiar symmetry of the dipolar quasiparticles --- the invariance of their energy to a shift of their center of mass momentum. Here, we demonstrate the equivalence of these two approaches in detail. We first study a model where the charge and flux of each fermion is smeared over a radius Q^{-1} where results can be calculated to leading order in the small parameter Q/k_f. We study two dipolar-quasiparticle descriptions of the nu=1/2 state in the small-Q model and confirm that they yield the same density response function as in the FCS approach. We also study the single-particle Green's function and the effective mass, for one form of dipolar quasiparticles, and find the effective mass to be infra-red divergent, exactly as in the FCS approach. Finally, we propose a form for a Fermi-liquid theory for the dipolar quasiparticles, which should be valid in the physical case where Q is infinite., 22 pages, 4 figures

We consider the possibility of creating an adiabatic transition through a narrow neck, or point contact, between two different quantized Hall states that have the same number of edge modes, such as $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ and $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{1}{3}$. We apply both the composite-fermion and Luttinger-liquid formalism to analyze the transition. We suggest that using such adiabatic junctions one could build a dc step-up transformer, where the output voltage is higher than the input. Difficulties standing in the way of an experimental implementation of the adiabatic junction are addressed.

A recent theory has provided a possible explanation for the ``non-universal scaling'' of the low-temperature conductance (and conductivity) peak-heights of two-dimensional electron systems in the integer and fractional quantum Hall regimes. This explanation is based on the hypothesis that samples which show this behavior contain density inhomogeneities. Theory then relates the non-universal conductance peak-heights to the ``number of alternating percolation clusters'' of a continuum percolation model defined on the spatially-varying local carrier density. We discuss the statistical properties of the number of alternating percolation clusters for Corbino disc samples characterized by random density fluctuations which have a correlation length small compared to the sample size. This allows a determination of the statistical properties of the low-temperature conductance peak-heights of such samples. We focus on a range of filling fraction at the center of the plateau transition for which the percolation model may be considered to be critical. We appeal to conformal invariance of critical percolation and argue that the properties of interest are directly related to the corresponding quantities calculated numerically for bond-percolation on a cylinder. Our results allow a lower bound to be placed on the non-universal conductance peak-heights, and we compare these results with recent experimental measurements., 7 pages, 4 postscript figures included. Revtex with epsf.tex and multicol.sty. The revised version contains some additional discussion of the theory and slightly improved numerical results

Periodically driven systems, which can be described by Floquet theory, have been proposed to show characteristic behavior that is distinct from static Hamiltonians. Floquet theory proposes to describe such periodically driven systems in terms of states that are indexed by a photon number in addition to the usual Hilbert space of the system. We propose a way to measure directly this additional Floquet degree of freedom by the measurement of the DC conductance of a single channel quantum point contact. Specifically, we show that a single channel wire augmented with a grating structure when irradiated with microwave radiation can show a DC conductance above the limit of one conductance quantum set by the Landauer formula. Another interesting feature of the proposed system is that being non-adiabatic in character, it can be used to pump a strong gate-voltage dependent photo-current even with linearly polarized radiation., Comment: 9 pages; 3 figures: Final published version; includes minor revisions from the last version

We analyze the low-energy spectrum of a two-electron double quantum dot under a potential bias in the presence of an external magnetic field. We focus on the regime of spin blockade, taking into account the spin orbit interaction and hyperfine coupling of electron and nuclear spins. Starting from a model for two interacting electrons in a double dot, we derive a perturbative, effective two-level Hamiltonian in the vicinity of an avoided crossing between singlet and triplet levels, which are coupled by the spin-orbit and hyperfine interactions. We evaluate the level splitting at the anticrossing, and show that it depends on a variety of parameters including the spin orbit coupling strength, the orientation of the external magnetic field relative to an internal spin-orbit axis, the potential detuning of the dots, and the difference between hyperfine fields in the two dots. We provide a formula for the splitting in terms of the spin orbit length, the hyperfine fields in the two dots, and the double dot parameters such as tunnel coupling and Coulomb energy. This formula should prove useful for extracting spin orbit parameters from transport or charge sensing experiments in such systems. We identify a parameter regime where the spin orbit and hyperfine terms can become of comparable strength, and discuss how this regime might be reached., Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures

We study the excitation spectra and the dynamical structure factor of quantum Hall states in a finite size system through exact diagonalization. Comparison is made between the numerical results so obtained and the analytic results obtained from a modified RPA in the preceding companion paper. We find good agreement between the results at low energies., 22 pages (REVTeX 3.0). 10 figures available on request. Complete postscript file (including figures) for this paper are available on the World Wide Web at http://cmtw.harvard.edu/~simon/ ; Preprint number HU-CMT-94S02

To study the effects of Coulomb interactions on the properties of fractional quantum Hall edge states, we introduce a realistic model of a two-dimensional electron gas at a mesa-etched sample edge and solve it within electrostatic and Hartree-Fock approximations. We discuss the physics of the fractional quantum Hall strips separating the conducting edge channels and ways of estimating the widths of these strips. We relate our results to the measurements of nonlocal resistance by estimating the quasiparticle scattering rate and the corresponding equilibration length between the edge states and the conducting bulk.

We analyze interference phenomena in the quantum-Hall analog of the Fabry-Perot interferometer, exploring the roles of the Aharonov-Bohm effect, Coulomb interactions, and fractional statistics on the oscillations of the resistance as one varies the magnetic field B and/or the voltage V_G applied to a side gate. Coulomb interactions couple the interfering edge mode to localized quasiparticle states in the bulk, whose occupation is quantized in integer values. For the integer quantum Hall effect, if the bulk-edge coupling is absent, the resistance exhibits an Aharonov-Bohm (AB) periodicity, where the phase is equal to the number of quanta of magnetic flux enclosed by a specified interferometer area. When bulk-edge coupling is present, the actual area of the interferometer oscillates as function of B and V_G, with a combination of a smooth variation and abrupt jumps due to changes in the number of quasi-particles in the bulk of the interferometer. This modulates the Aharonov-Bohm phase and gives rise to additional periodicities in the resistance. In the limit of strong interactions, the amplitude of the AB oscillations becomes negligible, and one sees only the new "Coulomb-dominated" (CD) periodicity. In the limits where either the AB or the CD periodicities dominate, a color map of resistance will show a series of parallel stripes in the B-V_G plane, but the two cases show different stripe spacings and slopes of opposite signs. At intermediate coupling, one sees a superposition of the two patterns. We discuss the dependence of the interference intensities on parameters including the temperature and the backscattering strengths of the individual constrictions. We also discuss how results are modified in a fractional quantized Hall system, and the extent to which the interferometer may demonstrate the fractional statistics of the quasiparticles., Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures included

Constrictions in fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems not only facilitate backscattering between counter-propagating edge modes, but also may reduce the constriction filling fraction $\nu_c$ with respect to the bulk filling fraction $\nu_b$. If both $\nu_b$ and $\nu_c$ correspond to incompressible FQH states, at least part of the constriction region is surrounded by composite edges, whose low energy dynamics is characterized by a charge mode and one or several neutral modes. In the incoherent regime, decay of neutral modes describes the equilibration of composite FQH edges, while in the limit of coherent transport, the presence of neutral modes gives rise to universal conductance fluctuations. In addition, neutral modes renormalize the strength of scattering across the constriction, and thus can determine the relative strength of forward and backwards scattering., Comment: corrected description of the results of Ref. [10], Ref. [17] added

Motivated by recent experiments by the Westervelt group, which used a mobile tip to probe the electronic state of a segmented nanowire, we calculate shifts in Coulomb blockade peak positions, as a function of tip location, which we term ``Coulomb blockade microscopy.'' We show that if the tip can be brought sufficiently close to the nanowire, one can distinguish a high-density electronic liquid state from a Wigner-crystal state by microscopy with a weak-tip potential. In the opposite limit of a strongly negative tip potential, the potential depletes the electronic density under it and divides the quantum wire into two partitions. There the tip can push individual electrons from one partition to the other and the Coulomb blockade micrograph can clearly track such transitions. We show that this phenomenon can be used to qualitatively estimate the relative importance of the electron interaction compared to one-particle potential and kinetic energies. Finally, we propose that a weak-tip Coulomb blockade micrograph focusing on the transition between electron number $N=0$ and $N=1$ states may be used to experimentally map the one-particle potential landscape produced by impurities and inhomogeneities.

The S=1/2 degrees of freedom, which have been predicted to occur at the ends of an S=1 Heisenberg-like antiferromagnetic chain, have been observed recently in low-temperature ESR measurements of Ni(${\mathrm{C}}_{2}$${\mathrm{H}}_{8}$${\mathrm{N}}_{2}$${)}_{2}$${\mathrm{NO}}_{2}$${\mathrm{ClO}}_{4}$ (abbreviated NENP) containing selected impurities. The signal was found to decrease rapidly with temperature, at temperatures well below the Haldane gap. We present here a theoretical analysis of the loss of ESR signal due to the presence of thermal spin excitations on the chain, which can at least qualitatively explain the experiment.

We use a modified Hartree approximation to calculate the charge and current distributions induced by the presence of a positive point charge above a plane of positively charged superconducting anyons, at zero temperature. The anyons are taken to have semion statistics, and are treated within a simple two-species effective-mass model. We also consider a geometry where the point charge is partially screened by a second, metallic, plane that does not contain anyons. Applying the results of muon-spin-relaxation experiments in ${\mathrm{YBa}}_{2}$${\mathrm{Cu}}_{3}$${\mathrm{O}}_{7}$ and ${\mathrm{Bi}}_{2}$${\mathrm{Sr}}_{2}$${\mathrm{CaCu}}_{2}$${\mathrm{O}}_{8}$, we find that, if the ${\mathrm{CuO}}_{2}$ planes have charge carriers obeying semion statistics, then the magnetic field at the muon site should be in the range 0--25 G, with the actual value depending on the muon location in the crystal.

It has been predicted that the phase sensitive part of the current through a non-Abelian $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$ quantum Hall Fabry-Perot interferometer will depend on the number of localized charged $e/4$ quasiparticles (QPs) inside the interferometer cell. In the limit where all QPs are far from the edge, the leading contribution to the interference current is predicted to be absent if the number of enclosed QPs is odd and present otherwise, as a consequence of the non-Abelian QP statistics. The situation is more complicated, however, if a localized QP is close enough to the boundary so that it can exchange a Majorana fermion with the edge via a tunneling process. Here, we derive an exact solution for the dependence of the interference current on the coupling strength for this tunneling process, and confirm a previous prediction that for sufficiently strong coupling, the localized QP is effectively incorporated in the edge and no longer affects the interference pattern. We confirm that the dimensionless coupling strength can be tuned by the source-drain voltage, and we find that not only does the magnitude of the even-odd effect change with the strength of bulk-edge coupling, but in addition, there is a universal shift in the interference phase as a function of coupling strength. Some implications for experiments are discussed at the end.

We show in this paper that thermopower is enhanced in non-Abelian quantum Hall liquids under appropriate conditions. This is because thermopower measures entropy per electron in the clean limit, while the degeneracy and entropy associated with non-Abelian quasiparticles enhance entropy when they are present. Thus thermopower can potentially probe non-Abelian nature of the quasiparticles, and measure their quantum dimension., 5 pages. Minor revisions in response to referee comments. Published version

We study the effect of inhomogeneities in Hall conductivity on the nature of the zero resistance states seen in the microwave irradiated two-dimensional electron systems in weak perpendicular magnetic fields and show that time-dependent domain patterns may emerge in some situations. For an annular Corbino geometry, with an equilibrium charge density that varies linearly with radius, we find a time-periodic nonequilibrium solution, which might be detected by a charge sensor, such as a single electron transistor. For a model on a torus, in addition to static domain patterns seen at high and low values of the equilibrium charge inhomogeneity, we find that, in the intermediate regime, a variety of nonstationary states can also exist. We catalog the possibilities we have seen in our simulations. Within a particular phenomenological model, we show that linearizing the nonlinear charge continuity equation about a particularly simple domain-wall configuration and analyzing the eigenmodes allows us to estimate the periods of the solutions to the full nonlinear equation.

A nonlocal electric response in the spin-Hall regime, resulting from spin diffusion mediating charge conduction, is predicted. The spin-mediated transport stands out due to its long-range character, and can give dominant contribution to nonlocal resistance. The characteristic range of nonlocality, set by the spin diffusion length, can be large enough to allow detection of this effect in materials such as GaAs despite its small magnitude. The detection is facilitated by a characteristic nonmonotonic dependence of transresistance on the external magnetic field, exhibiting sign changes and decay., 4 pages, 2 figures

The Dyson-Maleev formalism is used to calculate the damping of spin waves in the two-dimensional Heisenberg antiferromagnet at asymptotically low temperatures and long wavelengths, both in the quantum and in the classical case. The calculations are done self-consistently. Various regimes are found for the decay rate depending on the relative size of the reduced temperature \ensuremath{\tau} and the dimensionless wave vector ka. In all cases, the decay rate is found to be much smaller than the frequency of the excitations, leading to well-defined spin waves, provided that k\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\gg}1, where the correlation length \ensuremath{\xi} is of order exp(const/\ensuremath{\tau}). At low but finite temperatures, we take into account fluctuation renormalizations which tend to increase the damping. The result of simulations on the classical lattice rotor model are presented and compared with the calculations. The agreement is qualitatively good. The simulations are also used to test the scaling form for the decay rate in the regime k\ensuremath{\xi}\ensuremath{\sim}1, which is outside the limit of validity of our direct spin-wave calculations.

We derive boundary conditions for the coupled spin-charge diffusion equations at a transmitting interface between two-dimensional electron systems with different strengths of the Rashba spin-orbit (SO) coupling $\alpha$, and an electric field parallel to the interface. We consider the limit where the spin-diffusion length l_s is long compared to the electron mean free path l, and assume that $\alpha$ changes discontinuously on the scale of l_s. We find that the spin density is also discontinuous on the scale of l_s. In the case where the electron mobility is constant across the interface, this leads to the complete suppression of the expected spin injection from a region with $\alpha\neq0$ into a non-SO region with $\alpha=0$., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure

Spin polarization may be generated far from the boundaries of a sample by nonlinear effects of an electric current, in the presence of "extrinsic" spin-orbit interactions, even when such generation is forbidden in the linear regime. We present a Corbino model where spin accumulation results from a combination of current gradients, nonlinearity, and cubic anisotropy. Further, we show that even with isotropic conductivity, nonlinear effects in a low-symmetry sidearm geometry can generate spin polarization far away from boundaries. Finally, we find that drift from the boundaries dominates spin polarization patterns observed in recent experiments on $\mathrm{GaAs}$ by Sih et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 096605 (2006)].

An arbitrarily small concentration of impurities can affect the spin Hall conductivity in a two-dimensional semiconductor system. We develop a Boltzmann-like equation that can be used for impurity scattering with an arbitrary angular dependence, and for an arbitrary angular dependence of the spin-orbit field $\mathbf{b}(\mathbf{k})$ around the Fermi surface. For a model applicable to a two-dimensional hole system in GaAs, if the impurity scattering is not isotropic, we find that the spin Hall conductivity depends on the derivative of $b$ with respect to the energy, on deviations from a parabolic band structure, and on the angular dependence of the scattering. In principle, the resulting spin Hall conductivity can be larger or smaller than the ``intrinsic value,'' and can have an opposite sign. In the limit of small-angle scattering, in a model appropriate for small hole concentrations, where the band is parabolic and $b\ensuremath{\propto}{k}^{3}$, the spin Hall conductivity has an opposite sign from the intrinsic value, and has a larger magnitude. Our analysis assumes that the spin-orbit splitting $b$ and the transport scattering rate ${\ensuremath{\tau}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ are both small compared to the Fermi energy, but the method is valid for an arbitrary value of $b\ensuremath{\tau}$.

We present theoretical calculations and experimental measurements which reveal the Luttinger-liquid (LL) nature of elementary excitations in a system consisting of two quantum wires connected by a long narrow tunnel junction at the edge of a GaAs/AlGaAs bilayer heterostructure. The boundaries of the wires are important and lead to a characteristic interference pattern in measurements on short junctions. We show that the experimentally observed modulation of the conductance oscillation amplitude as a function of the voltage bias can be accounted for by spin-charge separation of the elementary excitations in the interacting wires. Furthermore, boundaries affect the LL exponents of the voltage and temperature dependence of the tunneling conductance at low energies. We show that the measured temperature dependence of the conductance zero-bias dip as well as the voltage modulation of the conductance oscillation pattern can be used to extract the electron interaction parameters in the wires., Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures

A bilayer electron system in a strong magnetic field at low temperatures, with total Landau-level filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=1,$ can enter a strongly coupled phase, known as the (111) phase or the quantum Hall pseudospin ferromagnet. In this phase there is a large quantized Hall drag resistivity between the layers. Here we consider structures where the regions of (111) phase are separated by regions in which one of the layers is depleted by means of a gate, and various of the regions are connected together by wired contacts. We note that with suitable designs, one can create a dc step-up transformer where the output voltage is larger than the input, and we show how to analyze the current flows and voltages in such devices.

Mesoscopic solid state Aharonov-Bohm interferometers have been used to measure the ``intrinsic'' phase, ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{\mathrm{QD}},$ of the resonant quantum transmission amplitude through a quantum dot (QD). For a two-terminal ``closed'' interferometer, which conserves the electron current, Onsager's relations require that the measured phase shift $\ensuremath{\beta}$ only ``jumps'' between 0 and $\ensuremath{\pi}.$ Additional terminals open the interferometer but then $\ensuremath{\beta}$ depends on the details of the opening. Using a theoretical model, we present quantitative criteria (which can be tested experimentally) for $\ensuremath{\beta}$ to be equal to the desired ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{\mathrm{QD}}:$ the ``lossy'' channels near the QD should have both a small transmission and a small reflection.

Precessing ferromagnets are predicted to inject a spin current into adjacent conductors via Ohmic contacts, irrespective of a conductance mismatch with, for example, doped semiconductors. This opens the way to create a pure spin source spin battery by the ferromagnetic resonance. We estimate the spin current and spin bias for different material combinations., Comment: The estimate for the magnitude of the spin bias is improved. We find that it is feasible to get a measurable signal of the order of the microwave frequency already for moderate rf intensities

Motivated by recent scanning tunneling microscope (STM) experiments on cobalt clusters adsorbed on single wall metallic nanotubes [Odom {\em et al.}, Science {\bf 290}, 1549 (2000)], we study theoretically the size dependence of STM spectra and spin-flip scattering of electrons from finite size ferromagnetic clusters adsorbed on metallic surfaces. We study two models of nanometer size ferromagnets: (i) An itinerant model with delocalized s, p and d electrons and (ii) a local moment model with both localized d-level spins and delocalized cluster electrons. The effective exchange coupling between the spin of the cluster and the conduction electrons of the metallic substrate depends on the specific details of the single particle density of states on the cluster. The calculated Kondo coupling is inversely proportional to the total spin of the ferromagnetic cluster in both models and thus the Kondo temperature is rapidly suppressed as the size of the cluster increases. Mesoscopic fluctuations in the charging energies and magnetization of nanoclusters can lead to large fluctuations in the Kondo temperatures and a very asymmetric voltage dependence of the STM spectra. We compare our results to the experiments., Comment: 24 pages, clarification of several points

A pair of quantum dots, coupled through a point contact, can exhibit Coulomb blockade effects that reflect an oscillatory term in the dots' total energy whose value depends on whether the total number of electrons on the dots is even or odd. The effective energy associated with this even-odd alternation is reduced, relative to the bare Coulomb blockade energy for uncoupled dots, by a factor (1-f) that decreases as the interdot coupling is increased. When the transmission coefficient for interdot electronic motion is independent of energy and the same for all channels within the point contact (which are assumed uncoupled), the factor (1-f) takes on a universal value determined solely by the number of channels and the dimensionless conductance g of each individual channel. This paper studies corrections to the universal value of (1-f) that result when the transmission coefficent varies over energy scales of the size of the bare Coulomb blockade energy. We consider a model in which the point contact is described by a single orbital channel containing a parabolic barrier potential, and we calculate the leading correction to (1-f) for one-channel (spin-split) and two-channel (spin-degenerate) point contacts in the limit where the single orbital channel is almost completely open. By generalizing a previously used bosonization technique, we find that, for a given value of the dimensionless conductance g, the value of (1-f) is increased relative to its value for a zero-thickness barrier, but the absolute value of the increase is small in the region where our calculations apply., Comment: 13 pages, 3 Postscript figures

The electrodynamical response of the edge of a compressible quantum Hall system affects tunneling into the edge. Using composite Fermi liquid theory, we derive an effective action for the edge modes interacting with tunneling charge. This action generalizes the chiral Luttinger liquid theory of the quantum Hall edge to compressible systems in which transport is characterized by a finite Hall angle. In addition to the standard terms, the action contains a dissipative term. The tunneling exponent is calculated as a function of the filling fraction for several models, including screened and unscreened long-range Coulomb interaction, as well as a short-range interaction. We find that tunneling exponents are robust and to a large extent insensitive to the particular model. We discuss recent tunneling measurements in overgrown cleaved edge systems, and demonstrate that the profile of charge density near the edge is very sensitive to the parameters of the system. In general, the density is nonmonotonic, and can deviate from the bulk value by up to 30%. Implications for the correspondence to chiral Luttinger edge theories are discussed.