A Different View of the Quantum Hall Plateau-to-Plateau Transitions

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally that the transitions between adjacent integer quantum Hall (QH) states are equivalent to a QH-to-insulator transition occurring in the top Landau level, in the presence of an inert background of the other completely filled Landau levels, each contributing a single unit of quantum conductance, ${e}^{2}/h$, to the total Hall conductance of the system. The equivalence holds for numerical parameters describing the transition, as well as for the recently discovered reflection symmetry of the resistivity.