Quantum Hall Effects at Finite Temperatures

Abstract

We study the finite temperature (FT) effects on integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE) and fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) as predicted by the composite fermion model. We find that at $T\neq 0$, universality is lost, as is quantization because of a new scale $T_0=\pi\rho /m^\ast p$. We find that this loss is not inconsistent with the experimentally observed accuracies. While the model seems to work very well for IQHE, it agrees with the bulk results of FQHE but is shown to require refinement in its account of microscopic properties such as the effective mass. Our analysis also gives a qualitative account of the threshold temperatures at which the FQHE states are seen experimentally. Finally, we extract model independent features of quantum Hall effect at FT, common to all Chern-Simons theories that employ mean field ansatz.