Coulomb drag in intermediate magnetic fields

Abstract

We investigated theoretically the Coulomb drag effect in coupled 2D electron gases in a wide interval of magnetic field and temperature $ 1/τ\ll ω_c \ll E_F/\hbar$, $T \ll E_F$, $τ$ being intralayer scattering time, $ω_c$ being the cyclotron frequency. We show that the quantization of the electron spectrum leads to rich parametric dependences of drag transresistance on temperature and magnetic field. This is in contrast to usual resistance. New small energy scales are found to cut typical excitation energies to values lower than temperature. This may lead to a linear temperature dependence of transresistance even in a relatively weak magnetic field and can explain some recent experimental data. We present a novel mechanism of Coulomb drag when the current in the active layer causes a magnetoplasmon wind and the magnetoplasmons are absorbed by the electrons of the passive layer providing a momentum transfer. We derived general relations that describe the drag as a result of resonant tunneling of magnetoplasmons.