We have investigated hole transport in one-dimensional quantum wires in strained germanium two-dimensional layers. The ballistic conductance characteristics show the regular quantised plateaux in units of n2e2/h, where n is an integer. Additionally, new quantised levels are formed which correspond to values of n = 1/4 reducing to 1/8 in the presence of a strong parallel magnetic field which lifts the spin degeneracy but does not quantise the wavefunction. A further plateau is observed corresponding to n = 1/32 which does not change in the presence of a parallel magnetic field. These values indicate that the system is behaving as if charge was fractionalised with values e/2 and e/4, possible mechanisms are discussed.
@article{arxiv.1802.05205,
title = {Self-Organised Fractional Quantisation in a Hole Quantum Wire},
author = {Y. Gul and S. N. Holmes and M. Myronov and S. Kumar and M. Pepper},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.05205},
year = {2018}
}