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The local nature of incompressibility at quantised Hall effect modified by interactions

Since the experimental realisation of the integer quantised Hall effect in a two dimensional electron system subject to strong perpendicular magnetic fields in 1980, a central question has been the interrelation between the conductance quantisation and the topological properties of the system. It is conjectured that if the electron system is described by a Bloch hamiltonian, then the system is insulating in the bulk of the sample throughout the quantised Hall plateau due to magnetic field induced energy gap. Meanwhile, the system is conducting at the edges resembling a 2+1 dimensional topological insulator without the time-reversal symmetry. However, the validity of this conjecture remains unclear for finite size, non-periodically bounded real Hall bar devices. Here we show experimentally that the close relationship proposed between the quantised Hall effect and the topological bulk insulator is prone to break for specific magnetic field intervals within the plateau evidenced by our magneto-transport measurements performed on GaAs/AlGaAs high purity Hall bars with two inner contacts embedded to bulk. Our data presents a similar behaviour also for fractional states, in particular for 2/3, 3/5 and 4/3.