The Local Incompressibility of Fractional Quantum Hall States at a Filling Factor of 3/2

Abstract

We studied neutral excitations in a two-dimensional electron system with an orbital momentum ∆M = 1 and spin projection over magnetic field axis ∆S z = 1 in the vicinity of a filling factor of 3/2. It is shown that the 3/2 state is a singular point in the filling factor dependence of the spin ordering of the two-dimensional electron system. In the vicinity of ν = 3/2, a significant increase in the relaxation time (τ = 13 µs) for the excitations to the ground state is exhibited even though the number of vacancies in the lowest energy level is macroscopically large. The decrease of the relaxation rate is related to the spin texture transformation in the ground state induced by spin flips and electron density rearrangement. We claim the 3/2 state is a locally incompressible fractional quantum Hall state.