Origin of Strong Scarring of Wave Functions in Quantum Wells in a Tilted Magnetic Field

Abstract

The anomalously strong scarring of wavefunctions found in numerical studies of quantum wells in a tilted magnetic field is shown to be due to special properties of the classical dynamics of this system. A certain subset of periodic orbits are identified which are nearly stable over a very large interval of variation of the classical dynamics; only this subset are found to exhibit strong scarring. Semiclassical arguments shed further light on why these orbits dominate the experimentally observed tunneling spectra.