Anisotropic Transport of Quantum Hall Meron-Pair Excitations

Double-layer quantum Hall systems at total filling factor $\nu_T=1$ can exhibit a commensurate-incommensurate phase transition driven by a magnetic field $B_{\parallel}$ oriented parallel to the layers. Within the commensurate phase, the lowest charge excitations are believed to be linearly-confined Meron pairs, which are energetically favored to align with $B_{\parallel}$. In order to investigate this interesting object, we propose a gated double-layer Hall bar experiment in which $B_{\parallel}$ can be rotated with respect to the direction of a constriction. We demonstrate the strong angle-dependent transport due to the anisotropic nature of linearly-confined Meron pairs and discuss how it would be manifested in experiment.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 3 postscript figure

Statistics of skyrmions in Quantum Hall systems

We analyze statistical interactions of skyrmions in the quantum Hall system near a critical filling fraction in the framework of the Ginzburg-Landau model. The phase picked up by the wave-function during an exchange of two skyrmions close to $\nu=1/(2n+1)$ is $\pi[S+1/2(2n+1)]$, where $S$ is the skyrmion's spin. In the same setting an exchange of two fully polarized vortices gives rise to the phase $\pi/(2n+1)$. Skyrmions with odd and even numbers of reversed spins have different quantum statistics. Condensation of skyrmions with an even number of reversed spins leads to filling fractions with odd denominators, while condensation of those with an odd number of reversed spins gives rise to filling fractions with even denominators.Comment: 6 pages in Latex. addendum - skyrmions with odd or even number of reversed spins have different quantum statistics. They condense to form respectively even or odd denominator filling fraction state

Quantum fluctuations of classical skyrmions in quantum Hall Ferromagnets

In this article, we discuss the effect of the zero point quantum fluctuations to improve the results of the minimal field theory which has been applied to study %SMG the skyrmions in the quantum Hall systems. Our calculation which is based on the semiclassical treatment of the quantum fluctuations, shows that the one-loop quantum correction provides more accurate results for the minimal field theory.Comment: A few errors are corrected. Accepted for publication in Rapid Communication, Phys. Rev.

Skyrmion Dynamics and NMR Line Shapes in QHE Ferromagnets

The low energy charged excitations in quantum Hall ferromagnets are topological defects in the spin orientation known as skyrmions. Recent experimental studies on nuclear magnetic resonance spectral line shapes in quantum well heterostructures show a transition from a motionally narrowed to a broader `frozen' line shape as the temperature is lowered at fixed filling factor. We present a skyrmion diffusion model that describes the experimental observations qualitatively and shows a time scale of $\sim 50 \mu{\rm sec}$ for the transport relaxation time of the skyrmions. The transition is characterized by an intermediate time regime that we demonstrate is weakly sensitive to the dynamics of the charged spin texture excitations and the sub-band electronic wave functions within our model. We also show that the spectral line shape is very sensitive to the nuclear polarization profile along the z-axis obtained through the optical pumping technique.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Massive skyrmions in quantum Hall ferromagnets

We apply the theory of elasticity to study the effects of skyrmion mass on lattice dynamics in quantum Hall systems. We find that massive Skyrme lattices behave like a Wigner crystal in the presence of a uniform perpendicular magnetic field. We make a comparison with the microscopic Hartree-Fock results to characterize the mass of quantum Hall skyrmions at $\nu=1$ and investigate how the low temperature phase of Skyrme lattices may be affected by the skyrmion mass.Comment: 6 pages and 2 figure

Hartree-Fock Theory of Skyrmions in Quantum Hall Ferromagnets

We report on a study of the charged-skyrmion or spin-texture excitations which occur in quantum Hall ferromagnets near odd Landau level filling factors. Particle-hole symmetry is used to relate the spin-quantum numbers of charged particle and hole excitations and neutral particle-hole pair excitations. Hartree-Fock theory is used to provide quantitative estimates of the energies of these excitations and their dependence on Zeeman coupling strength, Landau level quantum numbers, and the thicknesses of the two-dimensional electron layers. For the case of $\nu$ near three we suggest the possibility of first order phase transitions with increasing Zeeman coupling strength from a many skyrmion state to one with many maximally spin-polarized quasiparticles.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure

Development of a graphical user interface for automatic separation of human voice from Doppler ultrasound audio in diving experiments

Doppler ultrasound (DU) is used in decompression research to detect venous gas emboli in the precordium or subclavian vein, as a marker of decompression stress. This is of relevance to scuba divers, compressed air workers and astronauts to prevent decompression sickness (DCS) that can be caused by these bubbles upon or after a sudden reduction in ambient pressure. Doppler ultrasound data is graded by expert raters on the Kisman-Masurel or Spencer scales that are associated to DCS risk. Meta-analyses, as well as efforts to computer-automate DU grading, both necessitate access to large databases of well-curated and graded data. Leveraging previously collected data is especially important due to the difficulty of repeating large-scale extreme military pressure exposures that were conducted in the 70-90s in austere environments. Historically, DU data (Non-speech) were often captured on cassettes in one-channel audio with superimposed human speech describing the experiment (Speech). Digitizing and separating these audio files is currently a lengthy, manual task. In this paper, we develop a graphical user interface (GUI) to perform automatic speech recognition and aid in Non-speech and Speech separation. This constitutes the first study incorporating speech processing technology in the field of diving research. If successful, it has the potential to significantly accelerate the reuse of previously-acquired datasets. The recognition task incorporates the Google speech recognizer to detect the presence of human voice activity together with corresponding timestamps. The detected human speech is then separated from the audio Doppler ultrasound within the developed GUI. Several experiments were conducted on recently digitized audio Doppler recordings to corroborate the effectiveness of the developed GUI in recognition and separations tasks, and these are compared to manual labels for Speech timestamps. The following metrics are used to evaluate performance: the average absolute differences between the reference and detected Speech starting points, as well as the percentage of detected

Liquid antiferromagnets in two dimensions

It is shown that, for proper symmetry of the parent lattice, antiferromagnetic order can survive in two-dimensional liquid crystals and even isotropic liquids of point-like particles, in contradiction to what common sense might suggest. We discuss the requirements for antiferromagnetic order in the absence of translational and/or orientational lattice order. One example is the honeycomb lattice, which upon melting can form a liquid crystal with quasi-long-range orientational and antiferromagnetic order but short-range translational order. The critical properties of such systems are discussed. Finally, we draw conjectures for the three-dimensional case.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 4 figures include

Square to stripe transition and superlattice patterns in vertically oscillated granular layers

We investigated the physical mechanism for the pattern transition from square lattice to stripes, which appears in vertically oscillating granular layers. We present a continuum model to show that the transition depends on the competition between inertial force and local saturation of transport. By introducing multiple free-flight times, this model further enables us to analyze the formation of superlattices as well as hexagonal lattice

Collective Modes of Soliton-Lattice States in Double-Quantum-Well Systems

In strong perpendicular magnetic fields double-quantum-well systems can sometimes occur in unusual broken symmetry states which have interwell phase coherence in the absence of interwell hopping. When hopping is present in such systems and the magnetic field is tilted away from the normal to the quantum well planes, a related soliton-lattice state can occur which has kinks in the dependence of the relative phase between electrons in opposite layers on the coordinate perpendicular to the in-plane component of the magnetic field. In this article we evaluate the collective modes of this soliton-lattice state in the generalized random-phase aproximation. We find that, in addition to the Goldstone modes associated with the broken translational symmetry of the soliton-lattice state, higher energy collective modes occur which are closely related to the Goldstone modes present in the spontaneously phase-coherent state. We study the evolution of these collective modes as a function of the strength of the in-plane magnetic field and comment on the possibility of using the in-plane field to generate a finite wave probe of the spontaneously phase-coherent state.Comment: REVTEX, 37 pages (text) and 15 uuencoded postscript figure