# Magneto-roton excitation of fractional quantum Hall effect: Comparison between theory and experiment

## Abstract

A major obstacle toward a quantitative verification, by comparison to experiment, of the theory of the excitations of the fractional quantum Hall effect has been the lack of a proper understanding of disorder. We circumvent this problem by studying the neutral magneto-roton excitations, whose energy is expected to be largely insensitive to disorder. The calculated energies of the roton at 1/3, 2/5 and 3/7 fillings of the lowest Landau level are in good agreement with those measured experimentally.

Quantitative tests of the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) have focused in the past primarily on the gap to charged excitation, determined experimentally from the temperature dependence of the longitudinal resistance. A factor of two discrepancy between theory and experiment has persisted over the years, believed to be caused by disorder for which a quantitatively reliable theoretical treatment is not available at the moment. In recent years there has been tremendous experimental progress in the measurement of the energy of the neutral magneto-roton excitation , both by inelastic Raman scattering  and by ballistic phonon absorption , and its energy has been determined at Landau level fillings of 1/3, 2/5, and 3/7. While the neutral magneto-roton is of great interest in its own right, being the lowest energy excitation of the FQHE state, the chief motivation of this work is the observation that the disorder is not likely to affect its energy significantly, in contrast to the energy of the charged excitation, because the roton has a much weaker dipolar coupling to disorder due to its overall charge neutrality, and the coupling is further diminished because the disorder in modulation doped samples is typically smooth on the scale of the size (on the order a magnetic length) of the spatially localized roton. There is also compelling experimental evidence for the insensitivity of the roton energy to disorder: the same roton energy was found for samples for which the gaps in transport experiments differed by as much as a factor of two . The roton therefore provides a wonderful opportunity for testing the quantitative validity of our understanding of the excitations of the fractional quantum Hall state. With this goal in mind, we have undertaken a comprehensive and realistic calculation of the roton energy at several filling factors in the lowest Landau level (LL).

The neutral excitation of the FQHE will be treated in the framework of the composite fermion (CF) theory , the composite fermion being the bound state of an electron and an even number of flux quanta (a flux quantum is defined as $`\varphi _0=hc/e`$). According to this theory, the interacting electrons at Landau level filling factor $`\nu =n/(2pn\pm 1)`$, $`n`$ and $`p`$ being integers, transform into weakly interacting composite fermions at an effective filling $`\nu ^{}=n`$; the ground state corresponds to $`n`$ filled CF-LLs and the neutral excitation to a particle-hole pair of composite fermions, called the CF exciton. Microscopic wave functions for the CF ground state and the CF exciton are readily constructed by analogy to the known wave functions of the electron ground state at filling factor $`n`$, $`\mathrm{\Phi }_n^{gs}`$, and its exciton, $`\mathrm{\Phi }_n^{ex}`$:

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_{\frac{n}{2n+1}}^{gs}=𝒫_{LLL}\underset{j<k}{}(z_jz_k)^{2p}\mathrm{\Phi }_n^{gs}$$
(1)   
$$\mathrm{\Phi }_{\frac{n}{2n+1}}^{ex}=𝒫_{LLL}\underset{j<k}{}(z_jz_k)^{2p}\mathrm{\Phi }_n^{ex},$$
(2)   
where $`z_j=x_j+iy_j`$ is the position of the $`j`$th particle, and $`𝒫_{LLL}`$ denotes projection of the wave function into the lowest Landau level. It was shown earlier that $`\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu `$ can be obtained from $`\mathrm{\Phi }_n`$ by substituting the single electron wave functions $`Y_\alpha (𝐫_j)`$ by the ‘single CF wave functions’ $`Y_\alpha ^{CF}(𝐫_j)=𝒫_{LLL}_k^{^{}}(z_jz_k)^pY_\alpha (𝐫_j)`$, the explicit form of which has been given in the literature . (The prime denotes the condition $`kj`$.) The composite fermion interpretation of $`\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu `$ follows since multiplication by the Jastrow factor $`_{j<k}(z_jz_k)^{2p}`$ is tantamount to attaching $`2p`$ flux quanta to each electron, converting it into a composite fermion. These wave functions have been found to be quite accurate in tests against exact diagonalization results available for small systems .

The Hamiltonian for the many electron system is given by

$$H=\frac{1}{2}\underset{jk}{}V(r_{jk})+V_{eb}$$
(3)   
where $`V_{eb}`$ is the electron-background interaction, with the background assumed to be comprised of a uniform positive charge, and $`V(r)`$ is the effective two-dimensional electron-electron interaction. (The kinetic energy is quenched in the lowest Landau level.) For a strictly two-dimensional system, $`V(r_{jk})=\frac{e^2}{ϵ|r_jr_k|},`$ where $`ϵ`$ is the dielectric constant of the background material. As we will see, an important quantitative correction comes from the finite transverse extent of the electron wave function, which alters the form of the effective two-dimensional interaction at short distances. The effective interaction can be calculated straightforwardly once the transverse wave function is known, which in turn will be determined by self-consistently solving the Schrödinger and Poisson equations, taking into account the interaction effects through the local density approximation (LDA) including the exchange correlation potential . Two geometries, single heterojunction and square quantum well (SQW), are considered due to their experimental relevance. To simplify the calculation, we assume that the electron wave function is confined entirely on the GaAs side of the heterojunction, which is a reasonably good approximation for deep confinement. It is stressed that neither the microscopic wave function nor the effective interaction contains any adjustable parameters; the former depends only on the filling factor, while the latter is determined from a first principles, self-consistent LDA calculation, with the two-dimensional density, the sample type (heterojunction or square quantum well) and the known sample parameters as the only input.

The energy of the exciton at $`\nu =\frac{n}{2n+1}`$,

$$\mathrm{\Delta }^{ex}=\frac{<\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{ex}|H|\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{ex}>}{<\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{ex}|\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{ex}>}\frac{<\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{gs}|H|\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{gs}>}{<\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{gs}|\mathrm{\Phi }_\nu ^{gs}>}$$
(4)   
is computed by Monte Carlo methods in the standard spherical geometry . Since moving a single particle at each step of the Monte Carlo changes the single CF wave function $`Y^{CF}`$ for all particles, the full wave function must be computed at each step. The exciton wave function is a linear superposition of $`N/n`$ Slater determinants, but each of these differs from the ground state only in one row, and the clever techniques for upgrading Slater determinants  significantly reduce the computing time, enabling us to study reasonably large systems (up to 63 composite fermions were used in the present study). The ground and excited state energies are evaluated sufficiently accurately to get a reasonable estimate for the gap. Due to the lack of edges in the spherical geometry being studied, we expect that the gap will have a linear dependence on $`N^1`$ to leading order, which is also borne out by our results. A linear extrapolation to the thermodynamic limit $`N^10`$ is taken after correcting the energies for the finite size deviation of the density from its thermodynamic value in the standard manner . All results below are thermodynamic extrapolations, unless mentioned otherwise. The energies are quoted in units of $`e^2/ϵl_0`$, where $`l_0=\sqrt{\mathrm{}e/eB}`$ is the magnetic length.

We have determined the dispersion of the CF exciton for 1/3, 2/5, and 3/7, corresponding to one, two, and three filled CF-LLs, respectively. The typical dispersion contains several minima, as shown in Fig. (1). We will term the lowest energy minimum the “fundamental” roton, or simply the roton, the others being secondary rotons. Since only discrete values of $`k`$ are available in our finite systems, the energy of the roton is obtained by fitting the points near the minimum to a parabolic dispersion

$$\mathrm{\Delta }_k^{ex}=\mathrm{\Delta }+\frac{\mathrm{}^2(kk_0)^2}{2m_R^{}}$$
(5)   
for each $`N`$, and then extrapolating $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ to the thermodynamic limit. The energies in the $`kl_00`$ limit and at the roton minimum are given in Table I for a strictly two dimensional system, along with $`m_R^{}`$.

Figs. (2) and (3) plot the energy of the CF roton and the long wavelength CF exciton for a heterojunction and a square quantum well (of width 25nm) as a function of density, calculated with the realistic LDA interaction, along with the experimental energies obtained in phonon absorption (at 1/3, 2/5, and 3/7) as well as in inelastic light scattering experiments (at 1/3). A more detailed comparison is given in Table II. In the small wave vector limit, the calculated energy at $`1/3`$ is off by $``$ 30%. It has been suggested that here the true lowest energy excitation may contain two CF-excitons, and there has been debate as to which excitation is being probed by the Raman scattering in this case . For the roton, the theoretical energies, obtained with no adjustable parameters, are in excellent agreement with the observed ones . One may worry that the situation will be spoiled by Landau level mixing. This turns out not to be the case. Following Ref. , we have estimated the importance of LL mixing for the roton energy by considering a variational wave function which is a linear combination of the projected and unprojected wave functions, and found that the corrections are on the order of 5% for typical densities, consistent with similar conclusion for the transport gap .

While the ballistic phonon absorption experiments directly measure the minimum energy (i.e., the roton) , the Raman experiments ideally probe the $`kl_00`$ limit of the CF exciton dispersion, the wavelength of the light being much larger than $`l_0`$. However, a breakdown of momentum conservation due to the presence of disorder can activate rotons as well , as a result of a singularity in the density of states. This has been crucial in explaining multiple peaks in the Raman spectra for the inter-LL excitations. At $`\nu =1/3`$, a low energy Raman peak has been interpreted as the roton . Recently, Kang et al.  have also observed modes at 2/5 and 3/7, at energies of 0.031 and 0.008 $`e^2/ϵl_0`$, respectively, which they interpret as the long wavelength neutral mode. Our calculated energies at 2/5 and 3/7 for a quantum well of width 30nm and density $`\rho =5.4\times 10^{10}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup> are 0.031(3) and 0.021(3) $`e^2/ϵl_0`$, respectively, for the roton, and 0.070(1) and 0.056(3) $`e^2/ϵl_0`$ for the $`kl_0=0`$ limit of CF exciton. At 2/5, the energy of the observed excitation is consistent not only with the calculated roton energy but also with those measured in ballistic phonon absorption experiments, and substantially smaller than the calculated $`kl_00`$ limit, which might suggest an identification with the roton. \[We note here that the observation of the 1/3 roton implies that the violation of the momentum conservation is sufficiently wide-spread as to render the fundamental rotons at 2/5 and 3/7 observable as well, which occur at roughly the same wave vectors ($`kl_01.61.7`$) as the 1/3 roton ($`kl_01.4`$).\] The energy of the 3/7 mode of Ref.  is anomalously low, however. Further work will be required to ascertain the origin of these new Raman modes; an experimental observation of multiple roton peaks will be especially helpful in clarifying this issue.

In conclusion, the insensitivity of the roton energy to disorder has afforded an opportunity for a direct quantitative confirmation of our theoretical understanding of the excitations of the fractional quantum Hall effect. We are grateful to Professor Aron Pinczuk for communicating his results to us prior to publication and for the continuous exchange of information, and to Xiaomin Zu for numerous helpful discussions. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. DMR-9615005, and by a grant of computing time by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (Origin 2000).