Steven H. Simon

_{Professor, Oxford Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford}

Thermal Transport in fractional quantum Hall Edges

Recent tour-de-force experiments (Banerjee, Heiblum, et al, Nature 2018) have measured the thermal conductance of the nu=5/2 edge in a GaAs electron gas and found it to be quantized as approximately K=5/2 (in appropriate dimensionless units). This result is unexpected, as prior numerical work predicts that the nu=5/2 state should be the Anti-Pfaffian phase of matter, which would give K=3/2, or the possibly the Moore-Read Pfaffian which would give K=7/2. I will discuss and evaluate several possible explanations of the experimental result.