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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Fingerprints of composite fermion Lambda levels in scanning tunneling microscopy

Songyang Pu1,2,*, Ajit C. Balram3,4,*, Yuwen Hu5, Yen-Chen Tsui5, Minhao He5, Nicolas Regnault6,5, Michael P. Zaletel7, Ali Yazdani5, and Zlatko Papić1

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Phys. Rev. B 110, L081107 – Published 14 August, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.110.L081107

Abstract

A composite fermion (CF) is a topological quasiparticle that emerges from a nonperturbative attachment of vortices to electrons in strongly correlated two-dimensional materials. Similar to noninteracting fermions that form Landau levels in a magnetic field, CFs can fill analogous “Lambda” levels, giving rise to the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect of electrons. Here, we show that Lambda levels can be directly visualized through the characteristic peak structure in the signal obtained via spectroscopy with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) on a FQH state. Complementary to transport, which probes the low-energy properties of CFs, we show that high-energy features in STM spectra can be interpreted in terms of Lambda levels. We numerically demonstrate that STM spectra can be accurately modeled using Jain's CF theory. Our results show that STM provides a powerful tool for revealing the anatomy of FQH states and identifying physics beyond the noninteracting CF paradigm.

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Information

Phys. Rev. B 110, L081107– Published 14 August, 2024
  • Received 13 December 2023
  • Accepted 29 July 2024
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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