The paired state of composite fermions is expected to support two kinds of excitations: vortices and unpaired composite fermions. We construct an explicit microscopic description of the unpaired composite fermions, which we demonstrate to be accurate for a 3-body model interaction and, possibly, adiabatically connected to the Coulomb solution. This understanding reveals that an unpaired composite fermion carries with it a charge-neutral "topological" exciton, which, in turn, helps provide microscopic insight into the origin of zero modes, fusion rules, and energetics.
The paired state of composite fermions is expected to support two kinds of excitations: vortices and unpaired composite fermions. We construct an explicit microscopic description of the unpaired composite fermions, which we demonstrate to be accurate for a 3-body model interaction and, possibly, adiabatically connected to the Coulomb solution. This understanding reveals that an unpaired composite fermion carries with it a charge-neutral "topological" exciton, which, in turn, helps provide microscopic insight into the origin of zero modes, fusion rules, and energetics.
Materials exhibiting exotic quantum phenomena at a macroscopic level are of great
interest because of its intrinsic value to Physics, and also because of its potential
applications in technology. Strongly correlated electronic systems form interesting
examples of these. Exploring them calls for a good understanding of its physics,
and development of new tools that are applicable to their analysis. Robustness
of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) makes it an ideal stage to study
strongly correlated electron systems. The complexity of the FQHE problem stems
directly from the strong interactions between the constituent particles and not
from the specific nature of the material it is implemented in. This work attempts
to gain a theoretical description of some of the less understood aspects of FQHE.
FQHE in the lowest Landau level is well understood using the theory of weakly
interacting emergent particles called composite fermions. Composite fermions
formed in the second Landau level however appear to be strongly interacting.
Of particular interest is the FQHE at 2 + 1/2 filling fraction, where the many body
ground state is believed to be described by a paired state of composite fermions,
represented by the Pfaffian wavefunction. Based on predicted properties of its
excitations, there has been proposals for implementing topological quantum com-
putations in this system. However a good understanding of the nature of these
excitations is still lacking.
This thesis introduces a class of many body wavefunctions called “bipartite
composite fermion states” that provide a unified description of all excitations of the
paired state at 5/2. In the bipartite composite fermion (BCF) picture, constituent
composite fermions split into two partitions which are correlated to each other.
Within each partition, they fill the lowest composite fermion Landau level of its
partition.
Properties of the BCF state can now be related to the properties of the individual partitions, which are well understood in terms of the composite fermion
theory. In particular, we show that the excitations of BCF states are obtained by
creating excitations in the individual partitions. The paired state with odd number of composite fermions should have an unpaired composite fermion. The BCF
model predicts that this unpaired composite fermion behaves as an exciton in the
quasiparticle and quasihole are in separate partitions. We confirm this prediction
numerically in finite size systems. Generalizations of bipartite composite fermion
functions to other filling fractions especially 2 + 4/7 and 2 + 3/5 are also studied.
Idea of bipartite composite fermions can be generalized to the case of more
partitions. Specifically, we look at tripartite composite fermion states which are
similar to the bipartite states, except that these have three correlated partitions
instead of two. Tripartite states have a filling fraction of ν = 3/5, and its particle
hole conjugate is a candidate wavefunction for describing the ν = 2 + 2/5…
This book bridges a gap between two major communities of Condensed Matter Physics, Semiconductors and Superconductors, that have thrived independently. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons, the authors raise fundamental questions of current interest: how does the Pauli exclusion principle wield its power on the fermionic components of bosonic particles at a microscopic level and how this affects the macroscopic physics? What can we learn from Wannier and Frenkel excitons and from Cooper pairs that helps us understand "bosonic condensation" of composite bosons and its difference from Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The authors start from solid mathematical and physical foundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs. They further introduce Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange - a novel mechanism not visualized by standard Feynman diagrams. Advanced undergraduate or graduate students in physics with no prior background will benefit from this book. The developed concepts and methodology should also be useful to present researches on ultracold atomic gases, exciton-polaritons, and quantum information.
Abstract This book bridges the gap between two major fields in condensed matter physics: semiconductors and superconductors. Through an original perspective that their key particles, excitons and Cooper pairs, are composite bosons (cobosons), the book raises fundamental questions: how does the Pauli exclusion principle affect the fermionic components of bosonic particles at the microscopic level, and how does this appear in the coboson many-body physics at the macroscopic level? What insights would the study of Wannier excitons, Frenkel excitons, and Cooper pairs provide about the “bosonic condensation” of composite bosons and how it differs from the Bose-Einstein condensation of elementary bosons? The book starts from a solid mathematical and physical foundation to derive excitons and Cooper pairs and introduces Shiva diagrams as a graphic support to grasp the many-body physics induced by fermion exchange in the absence of fermion-fermion interaction–a mechanism not visualized in standard Feynman diagrams. The book also covers composite bosons related to excitons: trions, biexcitons, and polaritons. The last part of the book is devoted to composite boson condensation, from the prototypical Bose-Einstein condensation of free elementary bosons and the consequence of interaction, to interacting electrons in the dense regime, to electron-hole pairs in the dense and dilute regimes. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in physics, with no prior background, will benefit from this book, as numerous appendices provide the materials required to follow the various chapters. The concepts and formalism presented should also prove useful in research on ultracold atomic gases, polariton condensation, and quantum information.
Single particle basis functions for composite fermions are obtained from which many-composite fermion states confined to the lowest electronic Landau level can be constructed in the standard manner, i.e. by building Slater determinants. This representation enables a Monte Carlo study of systems containing a large number of composite fermions, yielding new quantitative and qualitative information. The ground state energy and the gaps to charged and neutral excitations are computed for a number of fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) states, earlier off-limits to a quantitative investigation. The ground state energies are estimated to be accurate to ~0.1% and the gaps at the level of a few percent. It is also shown that at Landau level fillings smaller than or equal to 1/9 the FQHE is unstable to a spontaneous creation of excitons of composite fermions. In addition, this approach provides new conceptual insight into the structure of the composite fermion wave functions, resolving in the affirmative the question of whether it is possible to motivate the composite fermion theory entirely within the lowest Landau level, without appealing to higher Landau levels.
Topological pairing of composite fermions has led to remarkable ideas, such as excitations obeying non-Abelian braid statistics and topological quantum computation. We construct a p-wave paired Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) wave function for composite fermions in the torus geometry, which is a convenient geometry for formulating momentum space pairing as well as for revealing the underlying composite-fermion Fermi sea. Following the standard BCS approach, we minimize the Coulomb interaction energy at half filling in the lowest and the second Landau levels, which correspond to filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/2$ and $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$ in GaAs quantum wells, by optimizing two variational parameters that are analogous to the gap and the Debye cutoff energy of the BCS theory. Our results show no evidence for pairing at $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/2$ but a clear evidence for pairing at $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$. To a good approximation, the highest overlap between the exact Coulomb ground state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$ and the BCS state is obtained for parameters that minimize the energy of the latter, thereby providing support for the physics of composite-fermion pairing as the mechanism for the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect. We discuss the issue of modular covariance of the composite-fermion BCS wave function, and calculate its Hall viscosity and pair correlation function. By similar methods, we look for but do not find an instability to s-wave pairing for a spin-singlet composite-fermion Fermi sea at half-filled lowest Landau level in a system where the Zeeman splitting has been set to zero.
The composite fermion (CF) theory gives both a phenomenological description for many fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, as well as a microscopic construction for large scale numerical calculation of these topological phases. The fundamental postulate of mapping FQH states of electrons to integer quantum Hall (IQH) states of CFs, however, was not formally established. The Landau level (LL) projection needed for the microscopic calculations is in some sense uncontrolled and unpredictable. We rigorously derive the unitary relationship between electrons and the CFs, showing the latter naturally emerge from special interactions within a single LL, without resorting to any projection by hand. In this framework, all FQH states topologically equivalent to those described by the conventional CF theory (e.g., the Jain series) have exact model Hamiltonians that can be explicitly derived, and we can easily generalize to FQH states from interacting CFs. Our derivations reveal fundamental connections between the CF theory and the pseudopotential/Jack polynomial constructions, and argue that all Abelian CF states are physically equivalent to the IQH states, while a plethora of non-Abelian CF states can be systematically constructed and classified. We also discuss about implications to experiments and effective field theory descriptions based on the descriptions with CFs as elementary particles.