Hall voltage drives pulsing counter-currents of the sliding charge density wave and of quantized normal carriers at self-filled Landau levels

Abstract

Remnant pockets of carriers left over after formation of a charge density wave (CDW) were brought, by virtue of transverse electric and magnetic fields, to a current-carrying state at quantized Landau Levels. The generated Hall voltage polarizes and puts to sliding the flexible CDW background. The screening from the CDW allows for a so strong redistribution of normal electrons density under the action of the Lorentz force alone, that an integer filling of the lowest Landau level might be reached at one edge at the expense of the full depletion at another edge of the Hall bar. With the Hall field exceeding the sliding threshold, the regime of exactly compensated collective and normal counter-currents develops in the open-circuit direction across the bar. The annihilation of the two currents proceeds via a regular sequence of phase slips which are the space-time vortices of the CDW phase around the enforced amplitude nodes. The resulting spontaneous generation of coherent high (~GHz) frequency signals was detected by observations of multiple Shapiro steps. This picture results from studies of micron-sized Hall bars in crystals of NbSe3 prepared by means of focused ion beams. The interpretation is confirmed and illustrated by a numerical solution of the derived equations. The depinning pulse propagates from edges to the bulk and the sliding sets in, accompanied by the generation of periodic phase slips near the Hall bar edge where the CDW phase is advanced in steps of 2π at expense of the CDW amplitude passing through zero.