Strongly Anisotropic Transport in Higher Two-Dimensional Landau Levels

Low-temperature, electronic transport in Landau levels N>1 of a two-dimensional electron system is strongly anisotropic. At half-filling of either spin level of each such Landau level the magnetoresistance either collapses to form a deep minimum or is peaked in a sharp maximum, depending on the in-plane current direction. Such anisotropies are absent in the N=0 and N=1 Landau level, which are dominated by the states of the fractional quantum Hall effect. The transport anisotropies may be indicative of a new many particle state, which forms exclusively in higher Landau levels.Comment: 12 pages, 3 Postscript figure

Cosmic-ray strangelets in the Earth's atmosphere

If strange quark matter is stable in small lumps, we expect to find such lumps, called ``strangelets'', on Earth due to a steady flux in cosmic rays. Following recent astrophysical models, we predict the strangelet flux at the top of the atmosphere, and trace the strangelets' behavior in atmospheric chemistry and circulation. We show that several strangelet species may have large abundances in the atmosphere; that they should respond favorably to laboratory-scale preconcentration techniques; and that they present promising targets for mass spectroscopy experiments.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, revtex

Hamiltonian Description of Composite Fermions: Magnetoexciton Dispersions

A microscopic Hamiltonian theory of the FQHE, developed by Shankar and myself based on the fermionic Chern-Simons approach, has recently been quite successful in calculating gaps in Fractional Quantum Hall states, and in predicting approximate scaling relations between the gaps of different fractions. I now apply this formalism towards computing magnetoexciton dispersions (including spin-flip dispersions) in the $\nu=1/3$, 2/5, and 3/7 gapped fractions, and find approximate agreement with numerical results. I also analyse the evolution of these dispersions with increasing sample thickness, modelled by a potential soft at high momenta. New results are obtained for instabilities as a function of thickness for 2/5 and 3/7, and it is shown that the spin-polarized 2/5 state, in contrast to the spin-polarized 1/3 state, cannot be described as a simple quantum ferromagnet.Comment: 18 pages, 18 encapsulated ps figure