Recently, it was shown that fractional quantum Hall states can be defined on fractal lattices. Proposed exact parent Hamiltonians for these states are nonlocal and contain three-site terms. In this work, we look for simpler, approximate parent Hamiltonians for bosonic Laughlin states at half filling, which contain only onsite potentials and two-site hopping with the interaction generated implicitly by hardcore constraints (as in the Hofstadter and Kapit-Mueller models on periodic lattices). We use an ``inverse method'' to determine such Hamiltonians on finite-generation Sierpi\ifmmode \acute{n}\else \'{n}\fi{}ski carpet and triangle lattices. The ground states of some of the resulting models display relatively high overlap with the model states if up to third-neighbor hopping terms are considered, and by increasing the maximum hopping distance one can achieve nearly perfect overlaps. When the number of particles is reduced and additional potentials are introduced to trap quasiholes, the overlap with a model quasihole wave function is also high in some cases, especially for the nonlocal Hamiltonians. We also study how the small system size affects the braiding properties for the model quasihole wave functions and perform analogous computations for Hamiltonian models.
Recently, it was shown that fractional quantum Hall states can be defined on fractal lattices. Proposed exact parent Hamiltonians for these states are nonlocal and contain three-site terms. In this work, we look for simpler, approximate parent Hamiltonians for bosonic Laughlin states at half filling, which contain only onsite potentials and two-site hopping with the interaction generated implicitly by hardcore constraints (as in the Hofstadter and Kapit-Mueller models on periodic lattices). We use an ``inverse method'' to determine such Hamiltonians on finite-generation Sierpi\ifmmode \acute{n}\else '{n}\fi{}ski carpet and triangle lattices. The ground states of some of the resulting models display relatively high overlap with the model states if up to third-neighbor hopping terms are considered, and by increasing the maximum hopping distance one can achieve nearly perfect overlaps. When the number of particles is reduced and additional potentials are introduced to trap quasiholes, the overlap with a model quasihole wave function is also high in some cases, especially for the nonlocal Hamiltonians. We also study how the small system size affects the braiding properties for the model quasihole wave functions and perform analogous computations for Hamiltonian models.
We investigate lattice effects on wave functions that are lattice analogs of bosonic and fermionic Laughlin wave functions with number of particles per flux $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/q$ in the Landau levels. These wave functions are defined analytically on lattices with $\ensuremath{\mu}$ particles per lattice site, where $\ensuremath{\mu}$ may be different than $\ensuremath{\nu}$. We give numerical evidence that these states have the same topological properties as the corresponding continuum Laughlin states for different values of q and for different fillings $\ensuremath{\mu}$. These states define, in particular, particle-hole symmetric lattice fractional quantum Hall states when the lattice is half filled. On the square lattice it is observed that for $q\ensuremath{\le}4$ this particle-hole symmetric state displays the topological properties of the continuum Laughlin state at filling fraction $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/q$, while for larger q there is a transition towards long-range ordered antiferromagnets. This effect does not persist if the lattice is deformed from a square to a triangular lattice, or on the kagome lattice, in which case the topological properties of the state are recovered. We then show that changing the number of particles while keeping the expression of these wave functions identical gives rise to edge states that have the same correlations in the bulk as the reference lattice Laughlin states but a different density at the edge. We derive an exact parent Hamiltonian for which all these edge states are ground states with different number of particles. In addition this Hamiltonian admits the reference lattice Laughlin state as its unique ground state of filling factor 1/q. Parent Hamiltonians are also derived for the lattice Laughlin states at other fillings of the lattice, when $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\le}1/q$ or $\ensuremath{\mu}\ensuremath{\ge}1\ensuremath{-}1/q$ and when q=4 also at half filling.
Conformal field theory has recently been applied to derive few-body Hamiltonians whose ground states are lattice versions of fractional quantum Hall states. The exact lattice models involve interactions over long distances, which is difficult to realize in experiments. It seems, however, that such long-range interactions should not be necessary, as the correlations decay exponentially in the bulk. This poses the question, whether the Hamiltonians can be truncated to contain only local interactions without changing the physics of the ground state. Previous studies have, in a couple of cases with particularly much symmetry, obtained such local Hamiltonians by keeping only a few local terms and numerically optimizing the coefficients. Here, we investigate a different strategy to construct truncated Hamiltonians, which does not rely on optimization, and which can be applied independently of the choice of lattice. We test the approach on two models with bosonic Laughlin-like ground states with filling factor 1/2 and 1/4, respectively. We first investigate how the coupling strengths in the exact Hamiltonians depend on distance, and then we study the truncated models. For the case of 1/2 filling, we find that the truncated model with truncation radius 2 lattice constants on the square lattice and 1 lattice constant on the triangular lattice has an approximate twofold ground-state degeneracy on the torus, and the overlap per site between these states and the states constructed from conformal field theory is higher than 0.99 for the lattices considered. For the model at 1/4 filling, our results give some hints that a truncation radius of 5 on the square lattice and 7 on the triangular lattice might be enough, but the finite-size effects are too large to judge whether the topology is, indeed, present in the thermodynamic limit. The states with high overlap also have the expected topological entanglement entropies.
We study lattice models of charged particles in uniform magnetic fields. We show how longer range hopping can be engineered to produce a massively degenerate manifold of single-particle ground states with wave functions identical to those making up the lowest Landau level of continuum electrons in a magnetic field. We find that in the presence of local interactions, and at the appropriate filling factors, Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall wave function is an exact many-body ground state of our lattice model. The hopping matrix elements in our model fall off as a Gaussian, and when the flux per plaquette is small compared to the fundamental flux quantum one only needs to include nearest and next-nearest neighbor hoppings. We suggest how to realize this model using atoms in optical lattices, and describe observable consequences of the resulting fractional quantum Hall physics.
There has been significant interest in recent years in finding fractional quantum Hall physics in lattice models, but it is not always clear how these models connect to the corresponding models in continuum systems. Here we introduce a family of models that is able to interpolate between a recently proposed set of lattice models with Laughlin-like ground states constructed from conformal field theory and models with ground states that are practically the usual bosonic/fermionic Laughlin states in the continuum. Both the ground state and the Hamiltonian are known analytically, and we find that the Hamiltonian in the continuum limit does not coincide with the usual delta interaction Hamiltonian for the Laughlin states. We introduce quasiholes into the models and show analytically that their braiding properties are as expected if the quasiholes are screened. We demonstrate screening numerically for the 1/3 Laughlin model and find that the quasiholes are slightly smaller in the continuum than in the lattice. Finally, we compute the effective magnetic field felt by the quasiholes and show that it is close to uniform when approaching the continuum limit. The techniques presented here to interpolate between the lattice and the continuum can also be applied to other fractional quantum Hall states that are constructed from conformal field theory.
Realizing topological flat bands with tailored single-particle Hilbert spaces is a critical step toward exploring many-body phases, such as those featuring anyonic excitations. One prominent example is the Kapit-Mueller model, a variant of the Harper-Hofstadter model that stabilizes lattice analogs of the lowest Landau level states. The Kapit-Mueller model is constructed based on the Poisson summation rule, an exact lattice sum rule for coherent states. In this work, we consider higher Landau-level generalizations of the Poisson summation rule, from which we derive families of parent Hamiltonians on a half-flux lattice which have exact flat bands whose flatband wavefunctions are lattice version of higher Landau level states. Focusing on generic Bravais lattices with only translation and inversion symmetries, we discuss how these symmetries enforced gaplessness and singular points for odd Landau level series, and how to achieve fully gapped parent Hamiltonians by mixing even and odd series. Our model points to a large class of tight-binding models with suitable energetic and quantum geometries that are potentially useful for realizing non-Abelian fractionalized states when interactions are included. The model exhibits fast decay hopping amplitudes, making it potentially realizable with neutral atoms in optical lattices.
The first calculation of the true ground state of the parent Hamiltonian proposed by Laughlin [Laughlin, Ann. Phys. 191, 163 (1989)] for the m=2 fractional quantum Hall state on a torus is presented. Laughlin's model is generalized to the case of a system in a ladder geometry and rewritten in terms of familiar spin-spin interactions, demonstrating that the model corresponds to a long-range Heisenberg Hamiltonian with an additional four-site interaction. The exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian is performed to extract the energies, correlation functions, sublattice magnetization, and overlap with the quantum Hall state. Our results confirm the recent work showing that the model is not exact [Schroeter, Ann. Phys. 310, 155 (2004)] and also show it to be not without merit: the overlap between the quantum Hall (QH) state and exact ground state approaches the significant value of 0.83 in the limit that the ladder becomes infinitely long.