Temperature Dependence of the Tunneling Amplitude between Quantum Hall Edges

URL:http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.086801 DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.94.086801Recent experiments have studied the tunneling current between the edges of a fractional quantum Hall liquid as a function of temperature and voltage. The results of the experiment are puzzling because at “high” temperature (600-900 mK) the behavior of the tunneling conductance is consistent with the theory of tunneling between chiral Luttinger liquids, but at low temperature it strongly deviates from that prediction dropping to zero with decreasing temperature. In this Letter we suggest a possible explanation of this behavior in terms of the strong temperature dependence of the tunneling amplitude.We are grateful to S. Roddaro, V. Pellegrini, and F. Beltram for useful discussions and the use of their experimental data. We kindly acknowledge the hospitality of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden where part of this work was completed. This research was supported by NEST-INFM PRA-Mesodyf and NSF DMR-0313681. R. D'A. acknowledges the financial support by NEST-INFM PRA-Mesodyf