Thermal and tunneling pair creation of quasiparticles in quantum Hall systems

We make a semiclassical analysis of thermal pair creations of quasiparticles at various filling factors in quantum Hall systems. It is argued that the gap energy is reduced considerably by the Coulomb potential made by impurities. It is also shown that a tunneling process becomes important at low temperature and at strong magnetic field. We fit typical experimental data excellently based on our semiclassical results of the gap energy.