Magneto-absorption in HgTe/CdHgTe quantum wells with an inverted band structure in magnetic fields up to 30 T has been studied. It has been shown that the positions of magneto-absorption lines for transitions from the zero-mode Landau levels in a wide range of magnetic field cannot in principle be described in the “single-electron” approximation using the eight-band Kane model even taking into account effects associated with the absence of spatial inversion symmetry. The revealed dependence of the energies of optical transitions on the magnetic field can be qualitatively explained within a “many-body” picture, where transitions between Landau levels are considered as collective modes hybridized by the electron-electron interaction.

We report on observation of an unconventional structure of the quantum Hall effect (QHE) in a p-type HgTe/CdxHg1−xTe double quantum well (DQW) consisting of two HgTe layers of critical width. The observed QHE is a reentrant function of magnetic field between two i = 2 states (plateaus at ρxy = h/ie 2) separated by an intermediate i = 1 state, which looks like some anomalous peak on the extra-long i = 2 plateau when weakly expressed. The anomalous peak apparently separates two different regimes: a traditional QHE at relatively weak fields for a small density of mobile holes ps and a high-field QH structure with a 2 − 1 plateau-plateau transition corresponding to much larger ps. We show that only a part of holes, residing in an additional light hole subband in the DQW, participate in QHE at weak fields while the rest of holes is excluded into the reservoir formed in the lateral maximum of the valence subband. All the holes come into play at high fields due to a peculiar behavior of the zero-mode levels.

The electrically excited impurity emission from AlGaN/GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) structures in external magnetic field varying from 1.2 T to 1.5 T was investigated in this work at temperature of 4.2 K. We have observed the sharp emission line at (263 ± 1) cm−1 with FWHM of (5.8 ± 0.8) cm−1, which we have attributed to radiative electronic transitions in residual oxygen impurity atoms. The blueshift of resonant transition frequency due to presence of external magnetic field was observed. The width of the peak was found to be defined mainly by the thermal broadening at 4.2 K.

We investigated quantum Hall states in an inverted HgTe quantum well (QW) close to the critical thickness using transconductance fluctuation (TF) measurements. In the conduction band, several integer quantum Hall states were observed, corresponding to filling factors ν=1,2,3,4. For magnetic fields above 2 T, quantum Hall states ν=0 were observed in the normal gap. These observations agreed well with the previous studies of quantum Hall states on GaAs QWs and graphene. Interestingly, TFs corresponding to anomalous positive filling factor ν were clearly observed in the valence band. We attribute the emergence of those TFs to the localization and charging of the heavy holes located in the side maxima of the valence band.

We report on the far-infrared magnetospectroscopy of HgTe quantum wells with inverted band ordering at different electron concentrations. We particularly focus on optical transitions from zero-mode Landau levels, which split from the edges of electron-like and hole-like bands. We observe a pronounced dependence of the transition energies on the electron concentration varied by persistent photoconductivity effect. This is striking evidence that in addition to the already well-documented crystalline and interface asymmetries, electron-electron interactions also have a significant impact on the usual behavior of the optical transitions from zero mode Landau levels.

By using the self-consistent Born approximation, we investigate disorder effect induced by the short-range impurities on the band gap in two-dimensional Dirac systems with the higher order terms in momentum. Starting from the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang (BHZ) model, we calculate the density of states as a function of the disorder strength. We show that due to quadratic corrections to the Dirac Hamiltonian, the band gap is always affected by the disorder even if the system is gapless in the clean limit. Finally, we explore the disorder effects by using an advanced effective Hamiltonian describing the side maxima of the valence subband in HgTe quantum wells. We show that the band gap and disorder-induced topological phase transition in the real structures may differ significantly from those predicted within the BHZ model.

Understanding the forces that enable protein interactions is a major scientific challenge. Indeed, Brownian diffusion alone, which is usually considered as the main engine of protein dynamics, does not explain the rapidity and efficiency of the biomolecular reactions at works in cells. In this work, we will present observations of the collective oscillations of a model protein driven out-of-equilibrium by means of optical excitation in aqueous medium using terahertz spectroscopy.