Suppression of scattering in electron transport in mesoscopic quantum Hall systems

Abstract

We show that both the elastic and the inelastic phonon-scattering rates among edge-state transport channels in mesoscopic two-dimensional electron-gas systems can be dramatically suppressed by a large magnetic field. This results in an increase in the carrier mean free path allowing the observation of anomalously quantized integer Hall conductance in macroscopic dimensions. Relations of theoretical results with recent experiments are discussed.