Soft excitations and broken-symmetry states in bilayer quantum Hall ferromagnets

The recent report on the observation of soft magnetorotons in the dispersion of charge-density excitations across the tunneling gap in coupled bilayers at total Landau level filling factor nu(T) = 1 is reviewed. The inelastic light scattering experiments take advantage of the breakdown of wave vector conservation that occurs under resonant excitation. The results offer evidence that in the quantum Hall state there is a roton that softens and sharpens markedly when the phase boundary for transitions to highly correlated compressible states is approached. These findings are interpreted with Hartree-Fock evaluations of the dynamic structure factor. The model includes the effect of disorder in the breakdown of wave vector conservation and resonance enhancement profiles within a phenomenological approach. These results link the softening of magnetorotons to enhanced excitonic Coulomb interactions in the ferromagnetic bilayers. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.