Observation of Quantized Heat Flow in Fractional Quantum Hall States


  Mitali Banerjee [1]  ,  Moty Heiblum [1]  ,  Amir Rosenblatt [1]  ,  Yuval Oreg [1]  ,  Dima E. Feldman [2]  ,  Ady Stern [1]  ,  Vladimir Umansky [1]  
[1] Braun Center for Sub-Micron Research, Dept. of Condensed Matter Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel 76100
[2] Department of physics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA

The heat conductance of a ballistic one-dimensional channel is a quantity that depends only on universal constants,κ = π2kB2T/3h. It was predicted not to depend on the exchange statistics of the heat-carrying particles or on the strength of their mutual interaction. This had been verified experimentally only for weakly interacting systems of phonons, photons and electronic Fermi-liquids. We report here the first observation of quantized heat flow in a strongly interacting system of 2D electrons in the fractional quantum Hall effect regime. We observed such quantization of the chiral edge modes in a particle-like Laughlin state (filling 1/3) and in several hole-like states with fillings between ½ and 1; with the latter harbor counter-propagating neutral (chargeless) modes. The observed heat conductance of both, fractionally charged and neutral modes, is quantized as expected. Moreover, the measure total thermal conductance of each state was found to agree with the predicted value.