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arXiv:2504.18337

Fractonic Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Justin Schirmann, Peru d’Ornellas, Stahl, Charles, Adolfo G. Grushin

Published Apr 25, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In non-interacting systems, disorder can drive a trivial phase into a topological one. However little is known how to construct a fractional quantum Hall ground-state, a paradigmatic topologically ordered state, that exists both in crystalline and disordered lattices and is qualitatively different to known topological phases. Here, we propose a general method for building such a phase. This is done by coupling quantum wires placed aperiodically in real-space, where the spatial positioning allows us to tune the inter-wire couplings. We call the emergent phase the Fractonic Fractional Quantum Hall Effect as it displays a rich interplay of fractional quantum Hall physics with fractonic constraints, formed by coupling differently-fractionalised wires into a globally gapped phase. The ground state has an exponential degeneracy in system size, a signature of the emergence of fractons. It displays a rich phenomenology of excitations, which can either behave like anyons confined to move in one dimension (lineons), multiples of which can then hop between two wires (s-lineons) or be free to travel across the system (C-anyons), depending on the multiplicity. Both the ground state degeneracy and mutual statistics are directly determined by the real-space positions of the wires, which can be disordered. Our method provides an analytically solvable pathway to non-crystalline fractional quantum Hall effects and fractonic theories in two-dimensions, examples of which were lacking.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2504.18337

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Three-dimensional (3D) gapped topological phases with fractional excitations are divided into two subclasses: one has topological order with point-like and loop-like excitations fully mobile in the 3D space, and the other has fracton order with point-like excitations constrained in lower-dimensional subspaces. These exotic phases are often studied by exactly solvable Hamiltonians made of commuting projectors, which, however, are not capable of describing those exhibiting surface states with gapless chiral dispersion. Here we introduce a systematic way, based on cellular construction recently proposed for 3D topological phases, to construct another type of exactly solvable models in terms of coupled quantum wires with given inputs of cellular structure, two-dimensional Abelian topological order, and their gapped interfaces. We show that our models can describe both 3D topological and fracton orders (and even their hybrid) and study their universal properties such as quasiparticle statistics and topological ground-state degeneracy. We also apply this construction to two-dimensional coupled-wire models with ordinary topological orders and translation-symmetry-enriched topological orders. Our results pave the way for effective quantum field theory descriptions or microscopic model realizations of fracton orders with chiral gapless surface states.
We present a coupled-wire construction of a model with chiral fracton topological order. The model combines the known construction of ν=1/m\nu=1/mν=1/m Laughlin fractional quantum Hall states with a planar p-string condensation mechanism. The bulk of the model supports gapped immobile fracton excitations that generate a hierarchy of mobile composite excitations. Open boundaries of the model are chiral and gapless, and can be used to demonstrate a fractional quantized Hall conductance where fracton composites act as charge carriers in the bulk. The planar p-string mechanism used to construct and analyze the model generalizes to a wide class of models including those based on layers supporting non-Abelian topological order.
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Topological quantum phases of matter are often characterized by the presence of fractionalized quasiparticles, which exhibit non-trivial braiding statistics or carry fractional quantum numbers, or of protected gapless surface states. In this thesis, we study topological phases in two and three spatial dimensions, from the perspective of searching for new exotic quantum phases and of characterizing their experimental signatures.\nWe first study topological defects in fermionic paired superfluids and discover that in the presence of a multiply quantized vortex, such a state hosts unpaired fermions in the BCS regime. We predict that these unpaired fermions will result in an experimentally measurable deviation of the system's angular momentum from its value in the BEC regime. Focusing on two-dimensions, we then study superconductors coupled to dynamically fluctuating electromagnetism, and establish a universal framework for studying the low-energy physics of such systems. We derive topological field theories describing all spin-singlet superconductors which naturally capture the interplay of symmetry and topology in these gapped states.\nThe remainder of this thesis is focused on a novel class of long-range entangled states of matter, known as “fracton” phases, in both two- and three-dimensions. These phases exhibit an intriguing phenomenology, most surprising of which is the presence of excitations which are immobile in isolation. Studying the non-equilibrium dynamics of gapped fracton phases, we discover that they naturally exhibit glassy quantum dynamics in the absence of quenched disorder, and hence may have potential technological applications as robust quantum memories. Finally, we conclude with a description of fracton phases as higher-rank tensor gauge theories and discuss the emergent phases of matter in which a finite density of fractons or their bound states may exist.
We present a coupled-wire construction of a model with chiral fracton topological order. The model combines the known construction of $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/m$ Laughlin fractional quantum Hall states with a planar p-string condensation mechanism. The bulk of the model supports gapped immobile fracton excitations that generate a hierarchy of mobile composite excitations. Open boundaries of the model are chiral and gapless, and can be used to demonstrate a fractional quantized Hall conductance where fracton composites act as charge carriers in the bulk. The planar p-string mechanism used to construct and analyze the model generalizes to a wide class of models including those based on layers supporting non-Abelian topological order. We describe this generalization and additionally provide concrete lattice-model realizations of the mechanism.
Fracton order is an intriguing new type of order which shares many common features with topological order, such as topology-dependent ground-state degeneracies, and excitations with mutual statistics.However, it also has several distinctive geometrical aspects, such as excitations with restricted mobility, which naturally lead to effective descriptions in terms of higher-rank gauge fields.In this paper, we investigate possible effective field theories for three-dimensional fracton order, by presenting a general philosophy whereby topological-like actions for such higher-rank gauge fields can be constructed.Our approach draws inspiration from Chern-Simons and BF theories in 2+1 dimensions, and imposes constraints binding higher-rank gauge charge to higher-rank gauge flux.We show that the resulting fractonic Chern-Simons and BF theories reproduce many of the interesting features of their familiar two-dimensional cousins.We analyze one example of the resulting fractonic Chern-Simons theory in detail, and show that upon quantization it realizes a gapped fracton order with quasiparticle excitations that are mobile only along a subset of one-dimensional lines, and display a form of fractional self-statistics.The ground-state degeneracy of this theory is both topology and geometry dependent, scaling exponentially with the linear system size when the model is placed on a three-dimensional torus.By studying the resulting quantum theory on the lattice, we show that it describes a Z s generalization of the Chamon code.