Edge and Impurity Effects on Quantization of Hall Currents

We consider the edge Hall conductance and show it is invariant under perturbations located in a strip along the edge (decaying perturbations far from the edge are also allowed). This enables us to prove for the edge conductances a general sum rule relating currents due to the presence of two different media located respectively on the left and on the right half plane. As a particular interesting case we put forward a general quantization formula for the difference of edge Hall conductances in semi-infinite samples with and without a confining wall. It implies in particular that the edge Hall conductance takes its ideal quantized value under a gap condition for the bulk Hamiltonian, or under some localization properties for a random bulk Hamiltonian (provided one first regularizes the conductance; we shall discuss this regularization issue). Our quantization formula also shows that deviations from the ideal value occurs if a semi-infinite distribution of impurity potentials is repulsive enough to produce current-carrying surface states on its boundary.UPR 7061 au CNRSUMR 8088 au CNRS