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Proposal for resolving quantized Landau orbits via elastic XUV scattering

Sabrina Meyer1,*, Joris Sturm1, Christina Schröder1, Stephen Hughes2, Andreas Knorr1, and Lara Greten1,2,†

  • *Contact author: meyer@tu-berlin.de
  • †Contact author: lara.greten@queensu.ca
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Phys. Rev. B 113, 165421 – Published 21 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/hq91-75kb

Abstract

Electrons in a two-dimensional electron gas under a strong perpendicular magnetic field undergo cyclotron motion, whose quantization yields discrete Landau levels and quantized Larmor radii. The magnetic length—the Larmor radius of the smallest Landau orbit—is only tens of nanometers for fields of a few tesla. We propose a method to probe the spatial structure of Landau orbits via scattering with extreme ultraviolet radiation, whose wavelength naturally matches this scale. Starting from a microscopic Hamiltonian, we derive the far-field spectrum emitted by the optically induced current density. The Landau orbit contributions in the spectrum are suppressed due to scattering at the sample geometry. However, normalizing to the zero-magnetic-field reference defines a Landau-level scattering spectrum that isolates Landau orbit information from the full spectrum. A projection onto Laguerre polynomials allows for reconstructing the probability density distributions of individual Landau-level wave functions, featuring radial maxima at the quantized Larmor radii. This way, we propose an experimental method to determine details of the Landau orbits.

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Phys. Rev. B 113, 165421– Published 21 April, 2026
  • Received 18 November 2025
  • Accepted 23 March 2026
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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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