Thermal and viscous contrast in quantum Hall scanning-probe images
Abstract
Quantum Hall scanning images are often read as maps of a local potential, temperature, or viscosity, whereas a probe records a finite-resolution functional of a transport operator. We formulate this functional using Landau-level projection, a particle-number Ward identity, magnetization-subtracted thermoelectric transport, a hydrodynamic Stokes-Ohm inversion, and finite-tip Fisher information. Two results follow in complementary transport regimes. In the strong-field, sharp-Landau-level regime, the defect-induced thermoelectric and electrical Hall contrasts of a smooth scalar defect obey . At the retained long-wavelength order, the orbital form factor, defect geometry, and common tip kernel cancel after the heat-magnetization current is removed, so the zero of the thermoelectric contrast is pinned by energy weighting at rather than by defect shape. In the hydrodynamic regime, the measurable tensor amplitudes mix Hall, longitudinal, transverse, boundary, electrothermal, and kinetic channels, so a Hall-odd image is not by itself a Hall-viscosity measurement. For a representative graphene geometry, a Schur-complement fit against the stated nuisance library yields a conditional one-standard-deviation sensitivity of approximately 68 square nanometers at SNR0 = 200, with boundary slip the limiting nuisance. The framework turns visual interpretation of quantum Hall nanoscopy into a quantitative observability test for electrical, thermoelectric, and viscous response channels.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.16315,
title = {Thermal and viscous contrast in quantum Hall scanning-probe images},
author = {P. Shubham Parashar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16315},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
Comments: 18 pages, 5 figures; includes Supplemental Material