  Our study presents experimental measurements of the contact and longitudinal
voltage drops in Hall bars, as a function of the current amplitude. We are
interested in the heating phenomenon which takes place before the breakdown of
the quantum Hall effect, i.e. the pre-breakdown regime. Two types of samples
has been investigated, at low temperature (4.2 and 1.5K) and high magnetic
field (up to 13 T). The Hall bars have several different widths, and our
observations clearly demonstrate that the size of the sample influences the
heating phenomenon. By measuring the critical currents of both contact and
longitudinal voltages, as a function of the filling factor (around $i=2$), we
highlight the presence of a high electric field domain near the source contact,
which is observable only in samples whose width is smaller than 400 microns.
