Confinement-deconfinement transition due to spontaneous symmetry breaking in quantum Hall bilayers.

Band-inverted electron-hole bilayers support quantum spin Hall insulator and exciton condensate phases. Interest in quantum spin Hall effect in these systems has recently put them in the spotlight. We investigate such a bilayer in an external magnetic field. We show that the interlayer correlations lead to formation of a helical quantum Hall exciton condensate state. Existence of the counterpropagating edge modes in this system results in formation of a ground state spin-texture not supporting gapless single-particle excitations. The charged edge excitations in a sufficiently narrow Hall bar are confined: a charge on one of the edges always gives rise to an opposite charge on the other edge. Magnetic field and gate voltages allow the control of a confinement-deconfinement transition of charged edge excitations, which can be probed with nonlocal conductance. Confinement-deconfinement transitions are of great interest, not least because of their possible significance in shedding light on the confinement problem of quarks.

Andreev-Bragg Reflection from an Amperian Superconductor.

We show how an electrical measurement can detect the pairing of electrons on the same side of the Fermi surface (Amperian pairing), recently proposed by Patrick Lee for the pseudogap phase of high-Tc cuprate superconductors. Bragg scattering from the pair-density wave introduces odd multiples of 2k(F) momentum shifts when an electron incident from a normal metal is Andreev reflected as a hole. These Andreev-Bragg reflections can be detected in a three-terminal device, containing a ballistic Y junction between normal leads (1, 2) and the superconductor. The cross-conductance dI1/dV2 has the opposite sign for Amperian pairing than it has either in the normal state or for the usual BCS pairing.

Giant Negative Magnetoresistance Driven by Spin-Orbit Coupling at the LaAlO3/SrTiO3 Interface.

The LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface hosts a two-dimensional electron system that is unusually sensitive to the application of an in-plane magnetic field. Low-temperature experiments have revealed a giant negative magnetoresistance (dropping by 70%), attributed to a magnetic-field induced transition between interacting phases of conduction electrons with Kondo-screened magnetic impurities. Here we report on experiments over a broad temperature range, showing the persistence of the magnetoresistance up to the 20 K range--indicative of a single-particle mechanism. Motivated by a striking correspondence between the temperature and carrier density dependence of our magnetoresistance measurements we propose an alternative explanation. Working in the framework of semiclassical Boltzmann transport theory we demonstrate that the combination of spin-orbit coupling and scattering from finite-range impurities can explain the observed magnitude of the negative magnetoresistance, as well as the temperature and electron density dependence.

Interplay of exciton condensation and the quantum spin hall effect in InAs/GaSb bilayers.

We study the phase diagram of the inverted InAs/GaSb bilayer quantum wells. For a small tunneling amplitude between the layers, we find that the system is prone to the formation of an s-wave exciton condensate phase, where the spin structure of the order parameter is uniquely determined by the small spin-orbit coupling arising from the bulk inversion asymmetry. The phase is topologically trivial and does not support edge transport. On the contrary, for a large tunneling amplitude, we obtain a topologically nontrivial quantum spin Hall insulator phase with a p-wave exciton order parameter, which enhances the hybridization gap. These topologically distinct insulators are separated by an insulating phase with spontaneously broken time-reversal symmetry. Close to the phase transition between the quantum spin Hall and time-reversal broken phases, the edge transport shows quantized conductance in small samples, whereas in long samples the mean free path associated with the backscattering at the edge is temperature independent, in agreement with recent experiments.

Fermion-parity anomaly of the critical supercurrent in the quantum spin-Hall effect.

The helical edge state of a quantum spin-Hall insulator can carry a supercurrent in equilibrium between two superconducting electrodes (separation L, coherence length ξ). We calculate the maximum (critical) current I(c) that can flow without dissipation along a single edge, going beyond the short-junction restriction L << ξ of earlier work, and find a dependence on the fermion parity of the ground state when L becomes larger than ξ. Fermion-parity conservation doubles the critical current in the low-temperature, long-junction limit, while for a short junction I(c) is the same with or without parity constraints. This provides a phase-insensitive, dc signature of the 4 π-periodic Josephson effect.