Recent experiments in moiré quantum materials exhibit quantized Hall states without an external magnetic field, motivating continuum mechanisms based on smooth moiré-periodic pseudospin textures. We present a controlled theory of skyrmion Chern bands generated by such textures. An exact local
SU(2) transformation reveals an emergent non-Abelian gauge field; for large branch splitting we perform an operator-level Schrieffer-Wolff expansion, yielding a single-branch Hamiltonian together with systematically dressed physical operators that define the projected interacting theory beyond strict adiabaticity. The leading dynamics is governed by a
U(1) Berry connection whose flux is set by the skyrmion density, while controlled non-adiabatic corrections are fixed by the texture's real-space quantum geometric tensor. In a Landau-level representation built from the averaged emergent field, moiré-periodic modulations induce Umklapp-resolved deformations of Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman kinematics and microscopic sources of excess optical quantum weight above the topological lower bound. Assuming a gapped Hall phase, we further derive a skyrmion-crystal effective field theory with a universal Berry-phase term and a noncommutative magnetophonon. Our results provide experimentally accessible signatures for twisted transition-metal dichalcogenide homobilayers and rhombohedral graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride.
At continuous electronic phase transitions, Coulomb interactions can modify the relation between length, energy, and temperature, but experimentally disentangling their effects on spatial versus dynamical criticality has remained difficult, since finite-temperature scaling alone measures only the combined exponent
κ=1/(zγ). Here, we introduce two advances that resolve this limitation. First, by combining temperature scaling with independent current scaling, we separately extract the dynamical exponent
z and the localization-length exponent
γ at the quantum Hall plateau transition -- rather than inferring one from an assumed value of the other. Second, using dual-graphite-gated graphene devices in which the effective Coulomb interaction range is tuned geometrically by the ratio of the magnetic length
lB to the graphite-gate distance
d, we track this separation across both screened and unscreened interaction regimes within the same device platform. Temperature scaling gives
κ≃0.21 in the screened regime and
κ≃0.41 in the unscreened regime; combining this with current scaling reveals that screening changes
z from
≃1 in the unscreened regime to
≃2 in the screened regime. In contrast,
γ remains close to
2.4 throughout. Our results establish that gate-controlled screening selectively modifies the interaction-dependent dynamical sector of the quantum Hall transition, leaving the localization-length exponent
γ unchanged within experimental uncertainty. More broadly, this work establishes geometric screening as a versatile tool for controlling interactions and disentangling interaction and disorder effects in correlated two-dimensional systems, including fractional quantum Hall states, moiré materials, and other strongly localized electronic phases.
The quest for nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions is often hampered by the tendency of driving and dissipation to give rise to an effective temperature, resulting in classical behavior. In this work we shed new light on this issue by studying the effect of disorder on recently-introduced dissipation-induced Chern topological states, and examining the eigenmodes of the Hermitian steady state density matrix or entanglement Hamiltonian. We find that, similarly to equilibrium, each Landau band has a single delocalized level near its center. However, using three different finite size scaling methods we show that the critical exponent
ν describing the divergence of the localization length upon approaching the delocalized state is significantly different from equilibrium if disorder is introduced into the non-dissipative part of the dynamics. This indicates a new nonequilibrium quantum critical universality class accessible in cold-atom experiments.
A flat band with Chern number C = 0 , well isolated from the rest of Hilbert space by a gap much larger than interaction strength, is an unexpected context for fractional quantum Hall physics. In this work, we demonstrate the emergence of the fractional Chern insulator (FCI) states in such a trivial flat band using large-scale exact diagonalization and infinite density matrix renormalization group simulations. Hosted by an anisotropic lattice, this band has a sharp peak for the quantum geometry. At 1/3 hole filling, we find the unexpected FCI with 3-fold ground-state degeneracy and σ H = − 1 / 3 ( e 2 / h ) . The momentum-space carrier distribution shows that the quantum geometry peak tends to push the interacting holes away, toward other regions of the Brillouin zone with the nearly "ideal" quantum geometry, underlying the formation of the FCI in the C = 0 flat band. In comparison, we find only trivial ground states when the quantum geometry peak becomes less avoidable. Our work not only shows that FCl states could exist without the single-particle topology, relying on the more intrinsic quantum geometry, but also suggests a possibly generic scenario to explore FCIs in otherwise trivial flat bands.
We construct an effective-field theory for the quantum Hall system which embodies both localization and fractional statistics. The latter involves a Chern-Simons interaction, while the former involves a generalization of conventional localization theory. The theory is invariant under ``complexified'' duality transformations of the conductivities which appear as effective parameters of the model. By exploiting these parameter space symmetries, as well as the conformal symmetry which appears at renormalization-group fixed points, we are able to extract a precise prediction for the whole scaling diagram. It exhibits both fractional and integer phases, the exact location of all fixed points, and universal scaling exponents. With a plausible identification of the universality class of the theory in the replica limit, the value of the critical exponent for the delocalization transition between plateaus in the Hall conductivity is found to be 7/3, in apparent agreement with available scaling experiments.
We study the critical properties of the topological Anderson phase transition in a strongly disordered Chern insulator, separating the topological phase from a trivial Anderson insulator. We show that the transition is characterized by a non-zero electrical conductance and by the emergence of a critical length scale in the real-space profile of the local Chern marker. From this, we extract the correlation-length and the dynamical critical exponents, which are consistent with those of non-interacting models of the integer quantum Hall effect. We then ramp the disorder strength across the transition and study the ensuing dynamics. In contrast to clean topological systems, we find that the excitation density does not follow the Kibble-Zurek scaling. The non-equilibrium length scale associated with the local Chern marker is decoupled from the generation of excitations. For studied system sizes, we find it to be close to the Kibble-Zurek prediction for the topological-to-trivial quench, while it deviates from it for the reverse direction.