Observation of Inter-Valley Gap Anomaly of Two Dimensional electrons in Silicon

Lai, K.; Pan, W.; Tsui, D. C.; Lyon, S.; Mühlberger, M.; Schäffler, F.

Observation of Inter-Valley Gap Anomaly of Two Dimensional electrons in Silicon

Authors

Description

We report here a systematic study of the energy gaps at the odd-integer quantum Hall states $ν=3$ and 5 under tilted magnetic (B) fields in a high quality Si two-dimensional electron system. Out of the coincidence region, the valley splitting is independent of the in-plane B fields. However, the $ν=3$ valley gap differs by about a factor of 3 ($Δ_v\sim$ 0.4K vs. 1.2K) at either side of the coincidence. More surprisingly, instead of reducing to zero, the energy gaps at $ν=3$ and 5 rise rapidly when approaching the coincidence angles. We believe that such anomaly is related to strong coupling of the nearly degenerate Landau levels.
4 REVTEX pages, 4 figures