Reentrant melting of soliton lattice phase in a bilayer quantum Hall system

Abstract

At large parallel magnetic field B∥, the ground state of the bilayer quantum Hall system forms a uniform soliton lattice phase. The soliton lattice will melt due to the proliferation of unbound dislocations at certain finite temperature leading to the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) melting. We calculate the KT phase boundary by numerically solving the newly developed set of Bethe ansatz equations, which fully take into account the thermal fluctuations of soliton walls. We predict that within certain ranges of B∥, the soliton lattice will melt at TKT. Interestingly enough, as temperature decreases, it melts at certain temperature lower than TKT exhibiting the reentrant behavior of the soliton liquid phase.