Eur. Phys. J. B (2014) 87: 203
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2014-50445-1

Regular Article

Helical nuclear spin order in a strip of stripes in the quantum Hall regime

¹ Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, 4056 Basel, Switzerland
² Center for Emergent Matter Science, RIKEN, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
³ Institute of Physics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, 84511 Bratislava, Slovakia
⁴ Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

^a e-mail: Tobias.Meng@unibas.ch

Received: 1 July 2014
Published online: 10 September 2014

Abstract

We investigate nuclear spin effects in a two-dimensional electron gas in the quantum Hall regime modeled by a weakly coupled array of interacting quantum wires. We show that the presence of hyperfine interaction between electron and nuclear spins in such wires can induce a phase transition, ordering electrons and nuclear spins into a helix in each wire. Electron-electron interaction effects, pronounced within the one-dimensional stripes, boost the transition temperature up to tens to hundreds of millikelvins in GaAs. We predict specific experimental signatures of the existence of nuclear spin order, for instance for the resistivity of the system at transitions between different quantum Hall plateaus.