2020/03/31 by Fang Qin, Shuai Li, Z. Z. Du +7 · 88 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Charge density wave #Condensed matter physics #Electron #Graphene research and applications #Hall effect #Landau quantization #Magnetic field #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum Hall effect #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum mechanics #Quantum phase transition #Superconductivity #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.206601
published in Physical Review Letters 125(20), 206601 (American Physical Society) · 6 pages, 4 figures, references and figures updated
openalex publication_date 2020/11/09 · arxiv created 2020/11/10 · arxiv updated 2020/11/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The charge-density-wave (CDW) mechanism of the 3D quantum Hall effect has been observed recently in ZrTe5 [Tang et al., Nature 569, 537 (2019)10.1038/s41586-019-1180-9]. Different from previous cases, the CDW forms on a one-dimensional (1D) band of Landau levels, which strongly depends on the magnetic field. However, its theory is still lacking. We develop a theory for the CDW mechanism of 3D quantum Hall effect. The theory can capture the main features in the experiments. We find a magnetic field induced second-order phase transition to the CDW phase. We find that electron-phonon interactions, rather than electron-electron interactions, dominate the order parameter. We extract the electron-phonon coupling constant from the non-Ohmic I-V relation. We point out a commensurate-incommensurate CDW crossover in the experiment. More importantly, our theory explores a rare case, in which a magnetic field can induce an order-parameter phase transition in one direction but a topological phase transition in other two directions, both depend on one magnetic field.