Tunneling into a Fractional Quantum Hall System and the Infrared Catastrophe

Abstract

We calculate the tunneling density of states of a two-dimensional interacting electron gas in a quantizing magnetic field. We show that the observed pseudogap in the density of states can be understood as the result of an infrared catastrophe in a noninteracting electron model. This catastrophe stems from the response of an electronic system to the potential produced by the abruptly added charge during a tunneling event. Our formalism can be applied at any filling factor without the use of Chern-Simons or composite fermion theory.