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Subsurface charge accumulation imaging of a quantum Hall liquid

Nature volume 392, pages 51–54 (1998)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 15 October 1998

Abstract

The unusual properties of two-dimensional electron systems that give rise to the quantum Hall effect have prompted the development of new microscopic models for electrical conduction1,2,3,4,5,6. The bulk properties of the quantum Hall effect have also been studied experimentally using a variety of probes including transport7,8, photoluminescence9,10, magnetization11 and capacitance12,13 measurements. However, the fact that two-dimensional electron systems typically exist some distance (about 1,000 Å) beneath the surface of the host semiconductor has presented an important obstacle to more direct measurements of microscopic electronic structure in the quantum Hall regime. Here we introduce a cryogenic scanning-probe technique—‘subsurface charge accumulation’ imaging—that permits very high resolution examination of systems of mobile electrons inside materials. We use this technique to image directly the nanometre-scale electronic structures that exist in the quantum Hall regime.

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Figure 1: Diagram of the sample and measurement configuration.
Figure 2: In-phase (Qin) SCA images of a region of perturbed electron density in the 2DES.
Figure 3: Sequence of five in-phase SCA images for an unperturbed region of the 2DES at v ≈ 4.05.
Figure 4: Qin and Qout images at 2.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Cohen, E. Atmaca, M. Brodsky, H. B. Chan, A. Folch, S. Heemeyer, A.Shytov, D. Silevitch and N. B. Zhitenev for technical help, and B. I. Halperin, H. F. Hess, R. B. Laughlin, P. A. Lee and B. I. Shklovskii for discussions. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the Packard Foundation, JSEP, and the National Science Foundation DMR.

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Author notes

  1. S. H. Tessmer

    Present address: Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, 48824, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    S. H. Tessmer, P. I. Glicofridis, R. C. Ashoori & L. S. Levitov

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 37907, Indiana, USA

    M. R. Melloch

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Correspondence to R. C. Ashoori.

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Tessmer, S., Glicofridis, P., Ashoori, R. et al. Subsurface charge accumulation imaging of a quantum Hall liquid. Nature 392, 51–54 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/32112

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