Manipulation of a Nuclear Spin by a Magnetic Domain Wall in a Quantum Hall Ferromagnet

Abstract

The manipulation of a nuclear spin by an electron spin requires the energy to flip the electron spin to be vanishingly small. This can be realized in a many electron system with degenerate ground states of opposite spin polarization in different Landau levels. We present here a microscopic theory of a domain wall between spin unpolarized and spin polarized quantum Hall ferromagnet states at filling factor two with the Zeeman energy comparable to the cyclotron energy. We determine the energies and many-body wave functions of the electronic quantum Hall droplet with up to N = 80 electrons as a function of the total spin, angular momentum, cyclotron and Zeeman energies from the spin singlet ν = 2 phase, through an intermediate polarization state exhibiting a domain wall to the fully spin-polarized phase involving the lowest and the second Landau levels. We demonstrate that the energy needed to flip one electron spin in a domain wall becomes comparable to the energy needed to flip the nuclear spin. The orthogonality of orbital electronic states is overcome by the many-electron character of the domain - the movement of the domain wall relative to the position of the nuclear spin enables the manipulation of the nuclear spin by electrical means.