Abstract

Electrical and thermal transport on a fractional quantum Hall edge are determined by topological quantities inherited from the corresponding bulk state. While electrical transport is the standard method for studying edges, thermal transport appears more challenging.

In this seminar, I show that the shot noise generated on the edge provides a fully electrical method to probe the edge structure and in particular its thermal properties. In the generic incoherent transport regime, where individual edge channels fully equilibrate due to local inelastic scattering, the noise falls into three topologically distinct universality classes: The charge transport is always ballistic while thermal transport is either ballistic, diffusive, or “antiballistic (i.e. in the opposite direction to the current).” Correspondingly, the noise either vanishes, decays algebraically, or is constant up to exponentially small corrections in the edge length.

Through this classification, noise measurements in the fully equilibrated regime provide important insights to current edge state theories.