12.

2 Motion in a Magnetic Field 681

electrons. This finding is spurious. Quite apart from the fact that g
is not strictly 2 even for an electron in vacuum, solid state effects can
change both hw, and g quite substantially. We are mainly interested
in GaAs-based heterostructures, and may take the parameters of bulk
GaAs as a guide. The cyclotron energy hw, = eH/m*c is increased more
than tenfold over the free electron value because the band effective mass
m* = 0.07m is quite small. At the same time, the Zeeman splitting is
strongly reduced, since g x 0.44. The disparity between hwc and gpBH
is even greater in the heterostructures. When we speak about a Landau
level, it will always be for a given spin direction.
The eigenstates corresponding to (12.34) are (omitting the common
spin factor of the wave functions)

Such a state can be visualized as a stripe of width 1, centered at

N

yo, and extending uniformly over the whole length of the system in the
s-direction (Fig. 12.4). Where should we draw the stripe representing
the next Landau state? We could not distinguish it from the state we
have shown. The spacing Z2/L, between consecutive eigenvalues of yo
is much smaller than 1, so the centres of L x / l >> 1 other Landau states
lie within a stripe. The s-dependent exponential factor guarantees the
orthogonality of Landau-states, even though they may occupy almost
the same region of the plane.

' t

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Figure 12.4: Most of the weight of a Landau state is lying within a belt of width
1 centered about y = yo.