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arXiv:2111.01076 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

From the Gaffnian critical point to the incompressible 2/5 quantum Hall state

Sahana Das, Sudipto Das, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Sudhansu S. Mandal

Published Jan 31, 2022• 0 citations
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Abstract

Despite the high overlap with the exact Coulomb ground state, the so-called Gaffnian state fails to describe the incompressibility at the 2/5 quantum Hall filling factor and consequently it was conjectured to be a quantum critical state. To achieve a gapped state starting from the Gaffnian wave function, which we interpret as the interflavor pairing of the composite fermions, we propose a minimally ``modified Gaffnian'' wave function keeping the pairing intact. We find that a suitable hybridization of these two wave functions is an excellent description of the 2/5 quantum Hall state. It has a very high overlap with the exact Coulomb state and their entanglement spectra match up to reasonably higher levels. Interestingly, this hybridized wave function being a representative of a paired state suggests an exotic possibility of non-Abelian quasiparticle excitations at 2/5 filling.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.105.l041305

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Despite the high overlap with the exact Coulomb ground state, the so-called Gaffnian state fails to describe the incompressibility at the 2/5 quantum Hall filling factor and consequently it was conjectured to be a quantum critical state. To achieve a gapped state starting from the Gaffnian wave function, which we interpret as the interflavor pairing of the composite fermions, we propose a minimally ``modified Gaffnian'' wave function keeping the pairing intact. We find that a suitable hybridization of these two wave functions is an excellent description of the 2/5 quantum Hall state. It has a very high overlap with the exact Coulomb state and their entanglement spectra match up to reasonably higher levels. Interestingly, this hybridized wave function being a representative of a paired state suggests an exotic possibility of non-Abelian quasiparticle excitations at 2/5 filling.
It is commonly assumed in the studies of the fractional quantum Hall effect that the physics of a fractional quantum Hall state, in particular the character of its excitations, is invariant under a continuous deformation of the Hamiltonian during which the gap does not close. We show in this article that, at least for finite systems, as the interaction is changed from a model three body interaction to Coulomb, the ground state at filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/5$ evolves continuously from the so-called Gaffnian wave function to the composite fermion wave function, but the quasiholes alter their character in a nonperturbative manner. This is attributed to the fact that the Coulomb interaction opens a gap in the Gaffnian quasihole sector, pushing many of the states to very high energies. Interestingly, the states below the gap are found to have a one-to-one correspondence with the composite fermion theory, suggesting that the Gaffnian model contains composite fermions, and that the Gaffnian quasiholes are unstable to the formation of composite fermions when a two-body interaction term is switched on. General implications of this study are discussed.
The ground state at 4/11 filling factor is very well understood, Mukherjee et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 016801 (2014)] in terms of the 1/3-filled second effective Landau level of the composite fermions whose correlations resemble that of electrons in the ground state of a two-body Haldane pseudo-potential of relative angular momentum 3, V3{V}_{3}V3​. We here propose a closed-form ground-state wave function for V3{V}_{3}V3​ at 1/3 filling factor. We successfully compare it with the exact wave function for systems with a few electrons by calculating their mutual overlap, pair-correlation function, and entanglement spectra. By numerical exact diagonalization for a few electron systems, we find a window of nonzero V3{V}_{3}V3​ is essential together with V1{V}_{1}V1​ for being 4/11 state incompressible. The constructed wave function for the 4/11 state using this proposed wave function has satisfactorily high overlap with previously studied composite-fermion-diagonalized ground-state wave function.
Some fractional quantum Hall states observed in experiments may be described by first-quantized wavefunctions with special clustering properties such as the Moore-Read Pfaffian for filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$. This wavefunction has been constructed by constructing correlation functions of a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT) involving a free boson and a Majorana fermion. By considering other CFTs many other clustered states have been proposed as candidate fractional quantum Hall states under appropriate circumstances. It is believed that the underlying CFT should be unitary if one wants to describe an incompressible, i.e., gapped liquid state. We show that by changing the way one derives the wavefunction from its parent CFT it is possible to obtain an incompressible candidate state when starting from a nonunitary parent. The construction mimics a global change in parameters in the phase space of the electron system. We explicit our construction in the case of the so-called Gaffnian state (a state for filling factor 2/5) and also for the Haldane-Rezayi state (a spin-singlet state at filling 1/2). We note that there are obstructions along this path in the case of the permanent spin-singlet state of Read and Rezayi which can be characterized as a robust gapless state.
We investigate the feasibility of many candidate quantum Hall states for two-component bosons in the lowest Landau level. We identify interactions for which spin-singlet incompressible states occur at filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/3$, 4/54/54/5, and 4/34/34/3, and partially spin-polarized states at filling factors 3/43/43/4 and 3/23/23/2, where ``spin'' serves as a generic label for the two components. We study ground states, excitations, edge states, and entanglement spectrum for systems with up to 16 bosons and construct explicit trial wave functions to clarify the underlying physics. The composite fermion theory very accurately describes the ground states as well as excitations at $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/3$, 4/54/54/5, and 3/43/43/4, although it is less satisfactory for the $\ensuremath{\nu}=3/2$ state. For $\ensuremath{\nu}=4/3$ a ``non-Abelian spin-singlet'' state, which is the exact ground state of a three-body contact interaction, has been proposed to occur even for a two-body contact interaction; our trial wave functions are very accurate for the excitations of the three-body interaction, but they do not describe the excitations of the two-body interaction very well. Instead, we find that the $\ensuremath{\nu}=4/3$ state is more likely to be a spin-singlet state of reverse-flux-attached composite fermions at filling ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=4$. We also consider incompressible states at integral filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ and 2. The incompressible state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ is shown to be well described by the parton-based Jain spin-singlet wave function, and the incompressible state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=2$ as the spin-singlet state of reverse-flux-attached composite fermions at ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=2$, which provides an example of the bosonic integer topological phase.
Topological phases of matter are distinguished by topological invariants, such as Chern numbers and topological spins, that quantize their response to electromagnetic currents and changes of ambient geometry. Intriguingly, in the $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/5$ fractional quantum Hall effect, prominent theoretical approaches---the composite fermion theory and conformal field theory---have constructed two distinct states, the Jain composite fermion (CF) state and the Gaffnian state, for which many of the topological indices coincide and even the microscopic ground-state wave functions have high overlap with each other in system sizes accessible to numerics. At the same time, some aspects of these states are expected to be very different; e.g., their elementary excitations should have either Abelian (CF) or non-Abelian (Gaffnian) statistics. In this paper we investigate the close relationship between these two states by considering not only their ground states, but also the low-energy charged excitations. We show that the low-energy physics of both phases is spanned by the same type of quasielectrons of the neighboring Laughlin phase. The main difference between the two states arises due to an implicit assumption of short-range interaction in the CF approach, which causes a large splitting of the variational energies of the Gaffnian excitations. We thus propose that the Jain phase emerges as an effective Abelian low-energy description of the Gaffnian phase when the Hamiltonian is dominated by two-body interactions of sufficiently short range.
We study the Gaffnian trial wave function proposed to describe fractional quantum Hall correlations at Bose filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/3$ and Fermi filling $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/5$. A family of Hamiltonians interpolating between a hard-core interaction for which the physics is known and a projector whose ground state is the Gaffnian is studied in detail. We give evidence for the absence of a gap by using large-scale exact diagonalizations in the spherical geometry. This is in agreement with recent arguments based on the fact that this wave function is constructed from a nonunitary conformal field theory. By using the cylinder geometry, we discuss in detail the nature of the underlying minimal model and we show the appearance of heterotic conformal towers in the edge energy spectrum where left and right movers are generated by distinct primary operators.