Vanishing Hall voltage in a quasi-one-dimensional GaAs-AlxGa1-xAs heterojunction

Low-symmetry nonlocal transport in microstructured squares of delafossite metals

Intense work studying the ballistic regime of electron transport in two-dimensional systems based on semiconductors and graphene had been thought to have established most of the key experimental facts of the field. In recent years, however, additional forms of ballistic transport have become accessible in the quasi-two-dimensional delafossite metals, whose Fermi wavelength is a factor of 100 shorter than those typically studied in the previous work and whose Fermi surfaces are nearly hexagonal in shape and therefore strongly faceted. This has some profound consequences for results obtained from the classic ballistic transport experiment of studying bend and Hall resistances in mesoscopic squares fabricated from delafossite single crystals. We observe pronounced anisotropies in bend resistances and even a Hall voltage that is strongly asymmetric in magnetic field. Although some of our observations are nonintuitive at first sight, we show that they can be understood within a nonlocal Landauer-Büttiker analysis tailored to the symmetries of the square/hexagonal geometries of our combined device/Fermi surface system. Signatures of nonlocal transport can be resolved for squares of linear dimension of nearly 100 µm, approximately a factor of 15 larger than the bulk mean free path of the crystal from which the device was fabricated.

Vanishing Hall Response of Charged Fermions in a Transverse Magnetic Field

We study the Hall response of two-dimensional lattice systems of charged fermions in a transverse magnetic field, in the ballistic coherent limit. We identify a setup in which this response vanishes over wide regions of parameter space: the "Landauer-Büttiker" setup commonly studied for coherent quantum transport, consisting of a strip contacted to biased ideal reservoirs of charges. We show that this effect does not rely on particle-hole symmetry, and is robust to a variety of perturbations including variations of the transverse magnetic field, chemical potential, and temperature. We trace this robustness back to a topological property of the Fermi surface: the number of Fermi points with positive velocity of the system. We argue that the mechanism leading to a vanishing Hall response applies to noninteracting and interacting systems alike, which we verify in concrete examples using density-matrix renormalization group simulations.

Gate-defined graphene quantum point contact in the quantum Hall regime

We investigate transport in a gate-defined graphene quantum point contact in the quantum Hall regime. Edge states confined to the interface of p and n regions in the graphene sheet are controllably brought together from opposite sides of the sample and allowed to mix in this split-gate geometry. Among the expected quantum Hall features, an unexpected additional plateau at 0.5h/e2 is observed. We propose that chaotic mixing of edge channels gives rise to the extra plateau.