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Published on: May 30, 2014
Signatures of a Nonthermal Metastable State in Copropagating Quantum Hall Edge Channels
Kosuke Itoh1, Ryo Nakazawa1, Tomoaki Ota1
1Department of Physics, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2-12-1 Ookayama, Meguro, Tokyo 152-8551, Japan.
Abstract:
A Tomonaga-Luttinger (TL) liquid is known as an integrable system, in which a nonequilibrium many-body state survives without relaxing to a thermalized state. This intriguing characteristic is tested experimentally in copropagating quantum Hall edge channels at bulk filling factor ν=2. The unidirectional transport allows us to investigate the time evolution by measuring the spatial evolution of the electronic states. The initial state is prepared with a biased quantum point contact, and its spatial evolution is measured with a quantum-dot energy spectrometer. We find strong evidence for a nonthermal metastable state in agreement with the TL theory before the system relaxes to thermal equilibrium with coupling to the environment.
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