Search

We report on our study of the electron interaction effects in topological two-dimensional (2D) materials placed in a quantizing magnetic field. Taking our cue from a recent experimental report, we consider a particular case of bismuthene monolayer with a strong spin-orbit interaction which can be a Weyl semimetal when placed on a specially tuned substrate. Interestingly, we observe that in some Landau levels of this material, the interaction effects are strongly enhanced compared to those for a conventional 2D system. Such an enhancement of electron-electron interactions in these materials is largely due to an anisotropy present in the materials. Additionally, the interaction effects can be tuned by changing the coupling to the substrate and the strongest inter-electron interactions are observed when the system is a Weyl semimental. The observed enhancement of the interaction effects can therefore be an important signature of the 2D Weyl fermions., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, V2

The skin effect, where bulk modes collapse into boundary modes, is a key phenomenon in topological non-Hermitian systems, has been predominantly studied in spinless systems. Recent studies illustrate the magnetic suppression of the first-order skin effect while ignoring spin. However, the physical significance of a magnetic field in non-Hermitian skin effect with spin remains elusive. Here, we systematically explore non-Hermitian spinful systems based on generalized Hatano-Nelson models with SU(2) gauge potential fields. In an open one-dimensional lattice, the spin-up and spin-down states can be uniquely separated and localized at the two boundaries without magnetic field. When an external magnetic field is applied, the skin effect exhibits a smooth transition from bidirectional to unidirectional. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the first-order skin effect can be anomalously induced by a magnetic field in a topologically trivial non-Hermitian spinful system without any skin effect at zero field. The direction of such magnetically induced skin modes can be controlled by simply changing the amplitude and polarity of the magnetic field. In addition, we demonstrate a transition between non-Bloch PT and anti-PT symmetries in the system, and uncover the spindependent mechanism of non-Bloch PT symmetry. Our results pave the way for the investigation of non-Hermitian skin effect with spin degrees of freedom.

Various properties of interlayer excitons in double-layer transition metal dichalcogenides quantum dots are analyzed using a low-energy effective Hamiltonian with Coulomb interaction. We solve the single-particle Hamiltonian with and without a magnetic field analytically, then present the electron-hole pairing features of interlayer exciton by employing the exact diagonalization technique, where the electron and hole are located in two layers respectively. In a magnetic field, the Landau level gap, as well as the electron-hole separation of an exciton varies non-monotonously as the interlayer distance increases, attributed to the pseudospin-orbit coupling which also leads to the emergence of topological non-trivial pseudospin textures in the exciton states. We examine the influence of different materials in quantum dots stacking on the exciton states, comparing their impact to variations in layer distances and quantum dot sizes. We further explore two interacting interlayer excitons numerically. The binding energy is significantly enhanced by the exchange interaction when the two electrons have different spins. The optical absorption spectra from the ground state to low-lying excited states reveal distinct behaviors for different interlayer excitons, which can be utilized to distinguish the spin of electrons in excitons. Our results highlight the potential for controlling interlayer excitons and applications of optical devices in a magnetic field and tunable layer distance.

The Landau level mixing is the key in understanding the mysterious $5/2$ fractional quantum Hall effect in GaAs quantum well. Theoretical calculations with and without Landau level mixing show striking differences. However, the way to deal with the considerable strong Landau level mixing in GaAs is still unsatisfactory. We develop a method combining the screening and the perturbation theories to study the nature of the $5/2$ fractional quantum Hall effect in GaAs efficiently. The screening which has been succeed in explaining ZnO systems integrates out the low-energy Landau levels close to the related Landau level, while the other high-energy Landau levels are integrated out by the perturbation theory. We find that the ground states still hold the quasi-triplet degeneracy which implies the Pfaffian nature of the system. Furthermore, the particle-hole symmetry is only weakly violated since the particle-hole parity is close to unity. We propose that the ground state in the finite-size calculations can be approximated as a variational superposition of the Pfaffian and anit-Pfaffian states. In the experimental environment the symmetrized Pfaffian component is dominant, corresponding a thermal conductance around $2.5$ quanta can be understood consequently.

Spin-orbit couplings (SOCs), originating from the relativistic corrections in the Dirac equation, offer nonlinearity in the classical limit and are capable of driving chaotic dynamics. In a nanoscale quantum dot confined by a two-dimensional parabolic potential with SOCs, various quantum scar states emerge quasi-periodically in the eigenstates of the system, when the ratio of confinement energies in the two directions is nearly commensurable. The scars, displaying both quantum interference and classical trajectory features on the electron density, due to relativistic effects, serve as a bridge between the classical and quantum behaviors of the system. When the strengths of Rashba and Dresselhaus SOCs are identical, the chaos in the classical limit is eliminated as the classical Hamilton's equations become linear, leading to the disappearance of all quantum scar states. Importantly, the quantum scars induced by SOCs are robust against small perturbations of system parameters. With precise control achievable through external gating, the quantum scar induced by Rashba SOC is fully controllable and detectable.

We numerically study a 5/2 fractional quantum Hall system with even number of electrons using the exact diagonalization where both the strong Landau level (LL) mixing and a finite width of the quantum well have been considered and adapted into a screened Coulomb interaction. With the principal component analysis, we are able to recognize a compressible-incompressible phase transition in the parameter space made of the magnetic field and the quantum well width by the competition between the first two leading components of the ground states wave functions, which is consistent with the low-lying spectral feature and previous works in the odd-electron system. In addition, the presence of the subdominant third component suggests an incompressible transition occurring as the LL-mixing strength grows into a certain parameter region associated with the ZnO experiments. We further investigate the strongly LL-mixed phase in this emerging region with the Hall viscosity, wave function overlaps, and the entanglement spectra. Results show it can be well described as a particle-hole symmetrized Pfaffian state with the dual topological properties of the Pfaffian and the anti-Pfaffian states.

Recently, electron transport along chiral molecules has been attracting extensive interest and several intriguing phenomena have been reported in recent experiments, such as the emergence of zero-bias conductance peaks upon the adsorption of single-helical protein on superconducting films. Here, we study theoretically the electron transport through a two-terminal single-helical protein sandwiched between a superconducting electrode and a normal-metal one in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field. As the proximity-induced superconductivity attenuates with the distance from superconducting media, the pairing potential along the helix axis of the single-helical protein is expected to decrease exponentially, which is characterized by the decay exponent $\lambda$ and closely related to the experiments. Our results indicate that (i) a zero-bias conductance peak of $2e^2/h$ appears at zero temperature and the peak height (width) decreases (broadens) with increasing temperature, and (ii) this zero-bias peak can split into two peaks, which are in agreement with the experiments [see, e.g., Nano Lett. 19, 5167 (2019)]. Remarkably, Majorana zero modes are observed in this protein-superconductor setup in a wide range of model parameters, as manifested by the $Z_2$ topological invariant and the Majoroana oscillation. Interestingly, a specific region is demonstrated for decaying superconductivity, where topologically nontrivial and trivial zero modes coexist and the bandgap remains constant. With increasing the pairing potential, the topologically nontrivial zero modes will transform to the trivial ones without any bandgap closing-reopening, and the critical pairing potential of the phase transition attenuates exponentially with $\lambda$. Additionally, one of the two zero modes can be continuously shifted from one end of the protein toward the other end contacted by the normal-metal electrode., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

Quantum phase transitions with multicritical points are fascinating phenomena occurring in interacting quantum many-body systems. However, multicritical points predicted by theory have been rarely verified experimentally; finding multicritical points with specific behaviors and realizing their control remains a challenging topic. Here, we propose a system that a quantized light field interacts with a two-level atomic ensemble coupled by microwave fields in optical cavities, which is described by a generalized Dicke model. Multicritical points for the superradiant quantum phase transition are shown to occur. We determine the number and position of these critical points and demonstrate that they can be effectively manipulated through the tuning of system parameters. Particularly, we find that the quantum critical points can evolve into a Lifshitz point if the Rabi frequency of the light field is modulated periodically in time. Remarkably, the texture of atomic pseudo-spins can be used to characterize the quantum critical behaviors of the system. The magnetic orders of the three phases around the Lifshitz point, represented by the atomic pseudo-spins, are similar to those of an axial next-nearest-neighboring Ising model. The results reported here are beneficial for unveiling intriguing physics of quantum phase transitions and pave the way towards to find novel quantum multicritical phenomena based on the generalized Dicke model.

Mixing of Landau levels has been understood to be essential in governing the nature of the ground state for the even-denominator fractional quantum Hall effect. The incompressibility of the ground state at filling factor $5/2$ in the strong Landau-level-mixed systems, such as the ZnO quantum well, is not always stable. Here we present an approach to generally deal with this kind of systems and satisfactorily explain the recent experiments [Falson \textit{et al}. Sci. Adv. \textbf{4}, eaat8742 (2018)] by implementing the screening plus the thickness effect. Further, the phase diagrams of the incompressibility of the ground state indicate that the phase transitions can be explicitly extracted by observing the lowest gap of the collective modes when the magnetic field and the width of the quantum well are tuned. We also predict the incompressibility of the two-dimensional electron gas in higher Landau levels in another strong Landau-level-mixed system, viz., the black phosphorene, by considering the screening effect where the relevant even-denominator fractional quantum Hall effects can possibly be observed.

It is shown that the eigenproblem of any $2\times 2$ matrix Hamiltonian with discrete eigenvalues is involved with a supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The energy dependence of the superalgebra marks the disparity between the deduced supersymmetry and the standard supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The components of an eigenspinor are superpartners\textemdash up to a $SU(2)$ transformation\textemdash which allows to derive two reduced eigenproblems diagonalizing the Hamiltonian in the spin subspace. As a result, each component carries all information encoded in the eigenspinor. We also discuss the generalization of the formalism to a system of a single spin-$\frac{p}{2}$ coupled with external fields. The unconventional supersymmetry can be regarded as an extension of the Fulton-Gouterman transformation, which can be established for a two-level system coupled with multi oscillators displaying a mirror symmetry. The transformation is exploited recently to solve Rabi-type models. Correspondingly, we illustrate how the supersymmetric formalism can solve spin-boson models with no need to appeal a symmetry of the model. Furthermore, a pattern of entanglement between the components of an eigenstate of a many-spin system can be unveiled by exploiting the supersymmetric quantum mechanics associated with single spins which also recasts the eigenstate as a matrix product state. Examples of many-spin models are presented and solved by utilizing the formalism., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures

Here we propose an isotropic all electrical spin analyzer in a quantum ring with spin-orbit coupling by analytically and numerically modeling how the charge transmission rates depend on the polarization of the incident spin. The formalism of spin transmission and polarization rates in an arbitrary direction is also developed by analyzing the Aharonov-Bohm and the Aharonov-Casher effects. The topological spin texture induced by the spin-orbit couplings essentially contributes to the dynamic phase and plays an important role in spin transport. The spin transport features derived analytically has been confirmed numerically. This interesting two-dimensional electron system can be designed as a spin filter, spin polarizer and general analyzer by simply tuning the spin-orbit couplings, which paves the way for realizing the tunable and integrable spintronics device.

One-dimensional quantum rings with Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings are studied analytically and are in perfect agreement with the numerical results. The topological charge of the spin field defined by the winding number along the ring is also studied analytically and numerically in the presence of the spin-orbit interactions. We also demonstrate the cases where the one-dimensional model is invalid for a relatively large radius. However, the numerical results of the two-dimensional model always remain reliable. Just as many physical properties of the quantum rings are influenced by the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the topological charge is also found to vary periodically due to the step-like change of the angular momentum with an increase of the magnetic field. This is significantly different from the cases of quantum dots. We also study how the current is induced by the magnetic field and spin-orbit couplings, which is strong enough that it could to be detected. The magnetic induction lines induced by the spin field and the current are also analyzed which can be observed and could perhaps help identifying the topological features of the spin fields in a quantum ring.

The topological charge of the spin texture in a quantum dot with spin-orbit couplings is shown analytically here to be stable against the ellipticity of the dot. It is directly tunable by a single magnetic field and is related to the \textit{sign} of the Land\'e $g$ factor. In a quantum-dot helium, the overall winding number could have different property from that of the single-electron case (quantum-dot hydrogen), since tuning the number of electron affects the winding number by the Coulomb interaction and the $z$ component angular momentum $\langle L^{}_z \rangle$. The density profile and the spin texture influence each other when the Coulomb interaction is present. When $\langle L^{}_z \rangle$ is biased away from an integer by the spin-orbit couplings, the rotational symmetry is broken which induces strong density deformation. The sign of the topological charge may also be reversed with increasing magnetic field. These findings are of major significance since the applied magnetic field alone now provides a direct route to control the topological properties of quantum dots.

A non-reciprocal quantum ring, where one arm of the ring contains the Rashba spin-orbit interaction but not in the other arm, is found to posses very unique electronic properties. In this ring the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations are totally absent. That is because in a magnetic field the electron stays in the non-Rashba arm, while it resides in the Rashba arm for zero (or negative) magnetic field. The average kinetic energy in the two arms of the ring are found to be very different. It also reveals different "spin temperature" in the two arms of the non-reciprocal ring. The electrons are sorted according to their spins in different regions of the ring by switching on and off (or reverse) the magnetic field, thereby creating order without doing work on the system. This resembles the action of a demon in the spirit of Maxwell's original proposal, exploiting a non-classical internal degree of freedom. Our demon clearly demonstrates some of the required features on the nanoscale., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures

We study the spin textures of a confined two-dimensional electron in inhomogeneous magnetic fields. These fields can either be external or effective fields due to a background magnetic texture in the plane in which the electron resides. By analytical considerations, WKB-type approximations, and by performing numerical diagonalizations we show that the in-plane spin field components of a single electron can form vortices while the total spin field can become a skyrmion. Most interestingly, we find that topological trivial magnetic fields can induce topological spin field configurations in the eigenstates of the electron due to quantum effects.

Spin textures of one or two electrons in a quantum dot with Rashba or Dresselhaus spin-orbit couplings reveal several intriguing properties. We show that even at the single-electron level spin vortices with different topological charges exist. These topological textures appear in the {\it ground state} of the dots. The textures are stabilized by time-reversal symmetry breaking and are robust against the eccentricity of the dot. The phenomenon persists for the interacting two-electron dot in the presence of a magnetic field.

Landau level mixing plays an important role in the Pfaffian (or anti-Pfaffian) states. In ZnO the Landau level gap is essentially an order of magnitude smaller than that in a GaAs quantum well. We introduce the screened Coulomb interaction in a single Landau level to tackle that situation. Here we study the overlap of the ground state and the Pfaffian (or anti-Pfaffian) state at evendenominator fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states present in ZnO. The overlap is strongly system size-dependent which suggests a newly proposed particle-hole symmetry Pfaffian ground state in the extreme Landau level mixing limit. When the ratio of Coulomb interaction to the Landau level gap \k{appa} varies, we find a possible topological phase transition in the range 2 < \k{appa} < 3, which was actually observed in an experiment. We then study how the width of quantum well combined with screening influences the overlap., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication as a rapid communication in PRB

Even denominator fractional quantum Hall states in a ZnO quantum well reveal interesting phase transitions in a tilted magnetic field. We have analyzed the planar electron gas in ZnO, confined in a parabolic potential in the third dimension, perpendicular to the plane of the electron gas. Since the Landau level gap is very small in this system we have included the screened Coulomb potential in order to include the effects of all the Landau levels. We observe an incompressible state - compressible state phase transition induced by the tilted field. Additionally, the 5/2 state has been experimentally found to be missing in this system. We however propose that a wider quantum well may help to stabilize the incompressible phase at the 5/2 filling factor., Comment: 5 pages; 3 figures

We have analyzed the crucial role the Coulomb interaction strength plays on the even and odd denominator fractional quantum Hall effects in a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in the ZnO heterointerface. In this system, the Landau level gaps are much smaller than those in conventional GaAs systems. The Coulomb interaction is also very large compared to the Landau level gap even in very high magnetic fields. We therefore consider the influence of higher Landau levels by considering the screened Coulomb potential in the random phase approximation. Interestingly, our exact diagonalization studies of the collective modes with this screened potential successfully explain recent experiments of even and odd denominator fractional quantum Hall effects, in particular, the unexpected absence of the 5/2 state and the presence of 9/2 state in ZnO., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

We study the ground states and low-energy excitations of a generic Dirac material with spin-orbit coupling and a buckling structure in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field. The ground states can be classified into three types under different conditions: SU(2), easy-plane, and Ising quantum Hall ferromagnets. For the SU(2) and the easy-plane quantum Hall ferromagnets there are goldstone modes in the collective excitations, while all the modes are gapped in an Ising-type ground state. We compare the Ising quantum Hall ferromagnet with that of bilayer graphene and present the domain wall solution at finite temperatures. We then specify the phase transitions and transport gaps in silicene in Landau levels 0 and 1. The phase diagram strongly depends on the magnetic field and the dielectric constant. We note that there exists triple points in the phase diagrams in Landau level N = 1 that could be observed in experiments., Comment: 4 figures

In the presence of a magnetic field and an external periodic potential, the Landau level spectrum of a two-dimensional electron gas exhibits a fractal pattern in the energy spectrum which is described as the Hofstadter's butterfly. In this work, we develop a Hartree-Fock theory to deal with the electron-electron interaction in the Hofstadter's butterfly state in a finite-size graphene with periodic boundary conditions, in which we include both spin and valley degrees of freedom. We then treat the butterfly state as an electron crystal so that we could obtain the order parameters of the crystal in the momentum space and also in an infinite sample. The excitation gaps obtained in the infinite sample is comparable to those in the finite-size study, and agree with a recent experimental observation., Comment: 4 figures

The chiral two-dimensional electron gas in Landau levels $\left\vert N\right\vert >0$ of a Bernal-stacked graphene bilayer has a valley-pseudospin Ising quantum Hall ferromagnetic behavior at odd filling factors $\nu _{N}=1,3$ of these fourfold degenerate states. At zero interlayer electrical bias, the ground state at these fillings is spin polarized and electrons occupy one valley or the other while a finite electrical bias produces a series of valley pseudospin-flip transitions. In this work, we extend the Ising behavior to chirally-stacked multilayer graphene and discuss the hysteretic behavior of the Ising quantum Hall ferromagnets. We compute the transport gap due to different excitations: bulk electron-hole pairs, electron-hole pairs confined to the coherent region of a valley-pseudospin domain wall, and spin or valley-pseudospin skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs. We determine which of these excitations has the lowest energy at a given value of the Zeeman coupling, bias, and magnetic field., Comment: 18 pages with 9 eps figures

A magnetic field applied perpendicularly to the chiral two-dimensional electron gas (C2DEG)\ in a Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene quantizes the kinetic energy into a discrete set of Landau levels $N=0,\pm 1,\pm 2,...$ While Landau level $N=0$ is eighfold degenerate, higher Landau levels ($ \left\vert N\right\vert \geq 1$) are fourfold degenerate when counting spin and valley degrees of freedom. In this work, the Hartree-Fock approximation is used to study the phase diagram of the C2DEG at integer fillings $ \widetilde{\nu }=1,2,3$ of these higher Landau levels. At these filling factors, the C2DEG is a valley or spin Ising quantum Hall ferromagnet. At odd fillings, the C2DEG is spin polarized and has all its electrons in one valley or the other. There is no intervalley coherence in contrast with most of the the ground states in Landau level $N=0.$ At even filling, $\widetilde{\nu }=2,$ the C2DEG is either fully spin polarized with electrons occupying both valleys or spin unpolarized with electron occupying one of the two valleys. A finite electric field (or bias) applied perpendicularly to the plane of the C2DEG induces a series of first-order phase transitions between these different ground states. The transport gap or its slope is discontinuous at the bias where a transition occurs. Such discontinuity may result in a change in the transport properties of the C2DEG at that bias., Comment: 14 pages with 12 eps figures

At half filling of the fourfold degenerate Landau levels |n| \geq 1 in graphene, the ground states are spin polarized quantum Hall states that support spin skyrmion excitations for |n| =1,2,3. Working in the Hartree-Fock approximation, we compute the excitation energy of an unbound spin skyrmion-antiskyrmion excitation as a function of the Zeeman coupling strength for these Landau levels. We find for both the bare and screened Coulomb interactions that the spin skyrmion-antiskyrmion excitation energy is lower than the excitation energy of an unbound spin 1/2 electron-hole pair in a finite range of Zeeman coupling in Landau levels |n| =1,2,3. This range decreases rapidly for increasing Landau level index and is extremely small for |n| =3. For valley skyrmions which should be present at 1/4 and 3/4 fillings of the Landau levels |n| =1,2,3, we show that screening corrections are more important in the latter case. It follows that an unbound valley skyrmion-antiskyrmion excitation has lower energy at 3/4 filling than at 1/4. We compare our results with recent experiments on spin and valley skyrmion excitations in graphene., Comment: 15 pages with 11 eps figures

The two-dimensional electron gas in a bilayer graphene in the Bernal stacking supports a variety of uniform broken-symmetry ground states in Landau level N=0 at integer filling factors $\nu \in [-3,4].$ When an electric potential difference (or bias) is applied between the layers at filling factors $\nu =-1,3$, the ground state evolves from an interlayer coherent state at small bias to a state with orbital coherence at higher bias where \textit{electric} dipoles associated with the orbital pseudospins order spontaneously in the plane of the layers. In this paper, we show that by further increasing the bias at these two filling factors, the two-dimensional electron gas goes first through a Skyrmion crystal state and then into an helical state where the pseudospins rotate in space. The pseudospin textures in both the Skyrmion and helical states are due to the presence of a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction in the effective pseudospin Hamiltonian when orbital coherence is present in the ground state. We study in detail the electronic structure of the helical and Skyrmion crystal states as well as their collective excitations and then compute their electromagnetic absorption., Comment: 17 pages, 17 postscript figures

A graphene bilayer in a transverse magnetic field has a set of Landau levels with energies $E=\pm \sqrt{N(N+1)}\hslash \omega_{c}^{\ast}$ where $\omega_{c}^{\ast}$ is the effective cyclotron frequency and $% N=0,1,2,...$ All Landau levels but N=0 are four times degenerate counting spin and valley degrees of freedom. The Landau level N=0 has an extra degeneracy due to the fact that orbitals $n=0$ and $n=1$ both have zero kinetic energies. At integer filling factors, Coulomb interactions produce a set of broken-symmetry states with partial or full alignement in space of the valley and orbital pseudospins. These quantum Hall pseudo-ferromagnetic states support topological charged excitations in the form of orbital and valley Skyrmions. Away from integer fillings, these topological excitations can condense to form a rich variety of Skyrme crystals with interesting properties. We study in this paper different crystal phases that occur when an electric field is applied between the layers. We show that orbital Skyrmions, in analogy with spin Skyrmions, have a texture of electrical dipoles that can be controlled by an in-plane electric field. Moreover, the modulation of electronic density in the crystalline phases are experimentally accessible through a measurement of their local density of states, Comment: 18 pages with 13 figures