Tunneling into the edge of a compressible Quantum Hall state

Abstract

We present a composite fermion theory of tunneling into the edge of a compressible quantum Hall system. The tunneling conductance is non-ohmic, due to slow relaxation of electromagnetic and Chern-Simons field disturbances caused by the tunneling electron. Universal results are obtained in the limit of a large number of channels involved in the relaxation. The tunneling exponent is found to be a continuous function of the filling factor nu, with a a slope that is discontinuous at nu=1/2 in the limit of vanishing bulk resistivity rho_xx. When nu corresponds to a principal fractional quantized Hall state, our results agree with the chiral Luttinger liquid theories of Wen, and Kane, Fisher and Polchinski.