Composite Fermi liquids (CFLs) are compressible states that can occur for 2D interacting fermions confined in the lowest Landau level at certain Landau level fillings. They have been understood as Fermi seas formed by composite fermions which are bound states of electromagnetic fluxes and electrons as reported by Halperin, Lee, and Read [Phys. Rev. B 47, 7312 (1993)PRBMDO0163-182910.1103/PhysRevB.47.7312]. At half filling, an explicitly particle-hole symmetric theory based on Dirac fermions was proposed by Son [Phys. Rev. X 5, 031027 (2015)PRXHAE2160-330810.1103/PhysRevX.5.031027] as an alternative low energy description. In this work, we investigate the Berry curvature of CFL model wave functions at a filling fraction of one-quarter, and observe that it is uniformly distributed over the Fermi sea except at the center where an additional π phase was found. Motivated by this, we propose an effective theory which generalizes Son's half filling theory, by internal gauge flux attachment, to all filling fractions in which fermionic CFLs can occur. The numerical results support the idea of internal gauge flux attachment.
Composite Fermi liquids (CFLs) are compressible states that can occur for 2D interacting fermions confined in the lowest Landau level at certain Landau level fillings. They have been understood as Fermi seas formed by composite fermions which are bound states of electromagnetic fluxes and electrons as reported by Halperin, Lee, and Read [Phys. Rev. B 47, 7312 (1993)PRBMDO0163-182910.1103/PhysRevB.47.7312]. At half filling, an explicitly particle-hole symmetric theory based on Dirac fermions was proposed by Son [Phys. Rev. X 5, 031027 (2015)PRXHAE2160-330810.1103/PhysRevX.5.031027] as an alternative low energy description. In this work, we investigate the Berry curvature of CFL model wave functions at a filling fraction of one-quarter, and observe that it is uniformly distributed over the Fermi sea except at the center where an additional π phase was found. Motivated by this, we propose an effective theory which generalizes Son's half filling theory, by internal gauge flux attachment, to all filling fractions in which fermionic CFLs can occur. The numerical results support the idea of internal gauge flux attachment.
Interlayer coherent composite Fermi liquid in Half-filled Landau Level bilayers, a window toward the hidden π Berry phase
For interacting 2D electrons in the presence of magnetic field at half filling, the system forms a `composite Fermi liquid(CFL)' with emergent Fermi surface and exhibits metallic behavior, based on the standard Halperin, Lee, and Read(HLR) field theory. Recently, Son introduces a composite Dirac theory as the low energy effective description of Half-filled Landau Level. Such theory exhibits particle-hole symmetry and the underlying composite Fermi surface displays a robust π Berry phase. In this paper, we start from the bilayer Half-filled Landau Level system where the two composite Fermi surface acquires interlayer coherence and forms bonding/anti-bonding composite fermi sea. The corresponding interlayer coherent composite Fermi liquid(ICCFL) phase provides a straightforward landscape to verify the Dirac nature in Son's theory and extract the hidden Berry phase structure of the composite Fermi surface. The ICCFL phase contains two Fermi surfaces which are detached in most regions but adhesive at two hot spots. Such nematic structure is a consequence of the Berry phase encoded in the Dirac Fermi surface which is absent in HLR theory. Due to the nematicity in ICCFL, the system supports half-quantum vortex with deconfined 2π gauge flux and the phase transition toward ICCFL contains a Lifshitz criticality with z=3 dynamical exponent. In addition, the exciton order parameter carries topological spin number so the ICCFL contains a unique Wen-Zee term which connects EM response with the background geometry curvature.
Here, the authors investigate the possibility that particle-hole symmetry in the lowest Landau level at half filling arises as an emergent low-energy symmetry. Specifically, they start with the traditional approach to the half-filled Landau level: an effective field theory known as the composite Fermi liquid pioneered by Halperin, Lee, and Read. In this theory, composite fermions arise when flux is attached to electrons in a half-filled Landau level. However, an equivalent starting point is one where one starts with a filled Landau level, depletes electrons (or equivalently, adds holes) to the point of half filling. One then attaches flux to the holes, and the resulting composite hole description is another viable description of the half-filled Landau level. The authors construct a particle-hole symmetric theory by studying a system consisting of alternating quasi-one-dimensional strips of composite Fermi liquid (CFL) and composite hole liquid (CHL), both of which break particle-hole symmetry. Gauge invariance requires the existence of gapless edge modes at the interface between the CFL and CHL. Out of these modes, they construct a neutral Dirac fermion coupled to an emergent U(1) gauge field. Thus, at distances long compared to the strip width, they demonstrate that the system is described by a Dirac fermion coupled to an emergent gauge field, with an anti-unitary particle-hole symmetry, precisely the form conjectured recently by Son to be the low-energy description of a particle-hole symmetric half-filled Landau level.
We derive the definition of the Berry phase for the adiabatic transport of a composite fermion (CF) in a half-filled composite Fermi liquid (CFL).It is found to be different from that adopted in previous investigations by Geraedts et al.For the standard CFL wave function, we analytically show that the Berry curvature is uniformly distributed in the momentum space.For the Jain-Kamilla wave function, we numerically show that its Berry curvature has a continuous distribution inside the Fermi sea and vanishes outside.We conclude that the CF with respect to both the microscopic wave functions is not a massless Dirac particle.
Motivated by the issue of particle-hole symmetry for the composite fermion Fermi sea at the half filled Landau level, Dam T. Son has made an intriguing proposal [Phys. Rev. X {\bf 5}, 031027 (2015)] that composite fermions are Dirac particles. We ask what features of the Dirac-composite fermion theory and its various consequences may be reconciled with the well established microscopic theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect and the 1/2 state, which is based on {\em non-relativistic} composite fermions. Starting from the microscopic theory, we derive the assertion of Son that the particle-hole transformation of electrons at filling factor ν=1/2 corresponds to an effective time reversal transformation (i.e. {kj}→{−kj}) for composite fermions, and discuss how this connects to the absence of 2kF backscattering in the presence of a particle-hole symmetric disorder. By considering bare holes in various composite-fermion Λ levels (analogs of electronic Landau levels) we determine the Λ level spacing and find it to be very nearly independent of the Λ level index, consistent with a parabolic dispersion for the underlying composite fermions. Finally, we address the compatibility of the Chern-Simons theory with the lowest Landau level constraint, and find that the wave functions of the mean-field Chern-Simons theory, as well as a class of topologically similar wave functions, are surprisingly accurate when projected into the lowest Landau level. These considerations lead us to introduce a normal form for the unprojected wave functions of the n/(2pn−1) states that correctly capture the topological properties even without lowest Landau level projection.
An effective field theory of composite Dirac fermions was proposed by Son [Phys. Rev. X 5, 031027 (2015)] as a theory of the half-filled Landau level with explicit particle-hole symmetry. We compute the electromagnetic response of this Son-Dirac theory on the level of the random phase approximation (RPA), where we pay particular attention to the effect of an additional composite-fermion dipole term that is needed to restore Galilean invariance. We find that once this dipole correction is taken into account, spurious interband transitions and collective modes that are present in the response of the unmodified theory either cancel or are strongly suppressed. We demonstrate that this gives rise to a consistent theory of the half-filled Landau level valid at all frequencies, at least to leading order in the momentum. In addition, the dipole contribution modifies the Fermi-liquid response at small frequency and momentum, which is a prediction of the Son-Dirac theory within the RPA that distinguishes it from a separate description of the half-filled Landau level by Halperin, Lee, and Read within the RPA.
While an ordinary Fermi sea is perturbatively robust to interactions, the paradigmatic composite-fermion (CF) Fermi sea arises as a nonperturbative consequence of emergent gauge fields in a system where there was no Fermi sea to begin with. A mean-field picture suggests two Fermi seas, of composite fermions made from electrons or holes in the lowest Landau level, which occupy different areas away from half filling and thus appear to represent distinct states. Using the microscopic theory of composite fermions, which satisfies particle-hole symmetry in the lowest Landau level to an excellent approximation, we show that the Fermi wave vectors at filling factors ν and 1-ν are equal when expressed in units of the inverse magnetic length, and are generally consistent with the experimental findings of Kamburov et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 196801 (2014)]. Our calculations suggest that the area of the CF Fermi sea may slightly violate the Luttinger area rule.