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arXiv:2302.07389 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Second Landau level projection of antiholomorphic Pfaffian wave functions

Jiangke Yang

Published May 15, 2023• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a state described by the second Landau level (SLL) projection of a generalized Moore-Read Pfaffian wave function with an antiholomorphic pairing component. Unlike the PH-Pfaffian state which is described by the lowest Landau level (LLL) projection of the same antiholomorphic Pfaffian wave function, we find the proposed state, which we call the SLL PH-Pfaffian, represents a gapped, incompressible phase, and provides an excellent description for the exact ground state of finite-size SLL Coulomb-interacting electrons over a range of the short-distance interaction strength. We also find the SLL PH-Pfaffian, when mapped to the LLL, has a very large overlap and the same low-energy orbital entanglement spectrum structures with the anti-Pfaffian state. We discuss possible interpretations of our results on the nature of the topological order of both states.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.107.195127

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We propose a state described by the second Landau level (SLL) projection of a generalized Moore-Read Pfaffian wave function with an antiholomorphic pairing component. Unlike the PH-Pfaffian state which is described by the lowest Landau level (LLL) projection of the same antiholomorphic Pfaffian wave function, we find the proposed state, which we call the SLL PH-Pfaffian, represents a gapped, incompressible phase, and provides an excellent description for the exact ground state of finite-size SLL Coulomb-interacting electrons over a range of the short-distance interaction strength. We also find the SLL PH-Pfaffian, when mapped to the LLL, has a very large overlap and the same low-energy orbital entanglement spectrum structures with the anti-Pfaffian state. We discuss possible interpretations of our results on the nature of the topological order of both states.
Recently we proposed a state described by the second Landau level (SLL) projection of the antiholomorphic Pfaffian wavefunction as a candidate for the ground state of the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect. In this paper we provide a mathematical proof that, when mapped to the lowest Landau level (LLL), the aforementioned state, which we call the SLL PH-Pfaffian state, becomes exactly a LLL projected orbital angular momentum l = -3 pairing Pfaffian state, which we call the LLL antiholomorphic f-wave pairing Pfaffian state, or the LLL af-Pfaffian state for short. We further prove that there is also an exact mapping between the upstream neutral Majorana fermion edge mode of the SLL PH-Pfaffian state and that of the LLL af-Pfaffian state. However, we find that while there exists an upstream neutral boson edge mode in the LLL af-Pfaffian state, it has no mapped counterpart in the SLL PH-Pfaffian state.
Recently we have shown that the anti-Pfaffian state and a state described by the second Landau level (SLL) projection of antiholomorphic Pfaffian wavefunctions have large overlap and almost identical low-energy orbital entanglement structures, suggesting they have the same topological order. In this paper, we further show that the similar entanglement structure observed in the SLL projected state is also identifiable in other Landau level projected states, indicating it is not the result of the SLL projection but rather a "fingerprint" of the PH-Pfaffian topological order of the original unprojected antiholomorphic Pfaffian wavefunctions. Consequently, we argue that the SLL projected state, and therefore the anti-Pfaffian state, is a PH-Pfaffian topological order state. We also discuss the implications on the edge physics.
We numerically assess model wave functions for the recently proposed particle-hole-symmetric Pfaffian (``PH-Pfaffian'') topological order, a phase consistent with the recently reported thermal Hall conductance [M. Banerjee et al., Nature 559, 205 (2018)] at the ever enigmatic $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$ quantum Hall plateau. We find that the most natural Moore-Read-inspired trial state for the PH-Pfaffian, when projected into the lowest Landau level, exhibits a remarkable numerical similarity on accessible system sizes with the corresponding (compressible) composite Fermi liquid. Consequently, this PH-Pfaffian trial state performs reasonably well energetically in the half-filled lowest Landau level, but is likely not a good starting point for understanding the $\ensuremath{\nu}=5/2$ ground state. Our results suggest that the PH-Pfaffian model wave function either encodes anomalously weak ppp-wave pairing of composite fermions or fails to represent a gapped, incompressible phase altogether.
The Moore-Read Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states have been under scrupulous review as candidates which describe the fractional quantum Hall effect at filling factor 5/2. Quantum states in the universality class of the Moore-Read Pfaffian/anti-Pfaffian have non-trivial intrinsic topological order and support low-energy non-Abelian excitations that have applications in fault-tolerant topological quantum computing schemes. Both states are exact ground states of three-body Hamiltonians that explicitly break particle-hole symmetry. We study the topological order of a competing ansatz state &PSgr;2 that is the exact ground state of a two-body Hamiltonian that preserves particle-hole symmetry. In particular, we calculate the bipartite entanglement entropy and spectra in the lowest Landau level in the spherical geometry for &PSgr; 2. We perform such calculations for a finite number of electrons up to 14. We then extrapolate to the thermodynamic limit the topological entanglement entropy γ as a measure of the topological order of the ansatz and compare to the known value of the Moore-Read Pfaffian/anti-Pfaffian state. We also study the orbital entanglement spectra for &PSgr;2 and compare with the Moore-Read Pfaffian and two-body Coulomb ground states. We show that our extrapolation of γ lies within the uncertainty of the known value of γ for the Moore-Read Pfaffian state, and that the orbital entanglement spectra of &PSgr;2 assumes a similar structure to that of the two-body Coulomb interaction.
In this work we propose a parton state as a candidate state to describe the fractional quantum Hall effect in the half-filled second Landau level. The wave function for this parton state is ${\mathcal{P}}_{\mathrm{LLL}}{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}}_{1}^{3}{[{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}}_{2}^{*}]}^{2}\ensuremath{\sim}{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}}_{2/3}^{2}/{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Phi}}}_{1}$ and in the spherical geometry it occurs at the same flux as the anti-Pfaffian state. This state has a good overlap with the anti-Pfaffian state and with the ground state obtained by exact diagonalization, using the second Landau level Coulomb interaction pseudopotentials for an ordinary semiconductor such as GaAs. By calculating the entanglement spectrum we show that this state lies in the same phase as the anti-Pfaffian state. A major advantage of this parton state is that its wave function can be evaluated for large systems, which makes it amenable to variational calculations. In the Appendix of this work, we have numerically assessed the validity of another candidate state at filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{5}{2}$, namely, the particle-hole-symmetric Pfaffian (PH-Pfaffian) state. We find that the proposed candidate wave function for the PH-Pfaffian state is particle-hole symmetric to a high degree but it does not appear to arise as the ground state of any simple Hamiltonian with two-body interactions.
A successful probing of the neutral Majorana mode in recent thermal Hall conductivity measurements opines in favor of the particle-hole symmetric Pfaffian (PH-Pf) topological order, contrasting the theoretical predictions of Pfaffian or anti-Pfaffian phases. Here we report a reentrant anomalous quantized phase that is found to be gapped in the thermodynamic limit, distinct from the conventional Pfaffian, anti-Pfaffian, or PH-Pf phases, at an intermediate strength of Landau level mixing. Our proposed wave function consistent with the PH-Pf shift in spherical geometry rightly captures the topological order of this phase, as its overlap with the exact ground state is very high and it reproduces low-lying entanglement spectra. A unique topological order, irrespective of the flux shifts, found for this phase, possibly corroborates the experimentally found topological order.