Microscopic details of stripes and bubbles in the quantum Hall regime

Abstract

We use a fully self-consistent laterally resolved Hartree-Fock approximation for numerically addressing the electron configurations at higher Landau levels in the quantum Hall regime for near-macroscopic sample sizes. Our results give microscopic details of stripe- and bubble-like charge density modulations and show how these emerge depending on the filling factor. We find that there exists a region at the boundaries of the stripes and bubbles with a density modulation that corresponds to a filling factor around half filling. The microscopic details of these boundary regions determine the geometrical boundary conditions for aligning the charge density modulation either as stripes or bubbles. Transport is modelled using a non-equilibrium network model giving a pronounced anisotropy in direction of the injected current in the stripe regime close to half filling. We obtain a stripe period of 2.9 cyclotron radii. Our results indicate the dominance of many particle physics in the integer quantum Hall regime and provide an intuitive understanding of its consequences in strong magnetic fields.