By using a bosonic Chern-Simons gauge theory the ground state of the planar electron system is analyzed in the presence of an external magnetic field. The distinctive feature of our theory is that a renormalization counter term (|α|/ M )|ψ| 4 which represents explicitly a hard-core condition plays important roles, where α and M are the statistics parameter and the mass of the electron. The following results are obtained systematically in the semiclassical approximation. When ν=1/ k ( k odd) with ν being the Landau level filling factor, the ground state is incompressible and described by the Laughlin wavefunction. On the other hand, when ν∼1/ k , the ground state is compressible and it is given by the Wigner crystal made of quasiholes (antivortices). The wavefunction of the Wigner crystal is also calculated, which is found to coincide with that of the Laughlin quasiholes. In these analyses the Coulomb interaction between electrons plays a crucial role.
By using a bosonic Chern-Simons gauge theory the ground state of the planar electron system is analyzed in the presence of an external magnetic field. The distinctive feature of our theory is that a renormalization counter term (|α|/ M )|ψ| 4 which represents explicitly a hard-core condition plays important roles, where α and M are the statistics parameter and the mass of the electron. The following results are obtained systematically in the semiclassical approximation. When ν=1/ k ( k odd) with ν being the Landau level filling factor, the ground state is incompressible and described by the Laughlin wavefunction. On the other hand, when ν∼1/ k , the ground state is compressible and it is given by the Wigner crystal made of quasiholes (antivortices). The wavefunction of the Wigner crystal is also calculated, which is found to coincide with that of the Laughlin quasiholes. In these analyses the Coulomb interaction between electrons plays a crucial role.
The fractional quantum Hall effect was experimentally discovered in 1982. It was observed that the Hall conductivity σyx of a two-dimensional electron system is quantized, σyx=e2/3h, in the vicinity of the Landau level filling factor ν=1/3. In 1983, Laughlin proposed a trial many-body wave function, which he claimed described a “new state of matter”—a homogeneous incompressible liquid with fractionally charged quasiparticles. Here, I develop an exact diagonalization theory that allows one to calculate the energy and other physical properties of the ground and excited states of a system of N two-dimensional Coulomb interacting electrons in a strong magnetic field. I analyze the energies, electron densities, and other physical properties of the systems with N≤7 electrons continuously as a function of magnetic field in the range 1/4≲ν<1. The results show that both the ground and excited states of the system resemble a sliding Wigner crystal whose parameters are influenced by the magnetic field. Energy gaps in the many-particle spectra appear and disappear as the magnetic field changes. I also calculate the physical properties of the ν=1/3 Laughlin state for N≤8 and compare the results with the exact ones. This comparison, as well as an analysis of some other statements published in the literature, show that the Laughlin state and its fractionally charged excitations do not describe the physical reality, neither at small N nor in the thermodynamic limit. The results obtained shed new light on the nature of the ground and excited states in the fractional quantum Hall effect.
The two-dimensional Wigner crystals are studied with the variational quantum Monte Carlo method. The close relationship between the ground-state wave function and the collective excitations in the system is illustrated, and used to guide the construction of the ground-state wave function of the strongly correlated solid. Exchange, correlation, and magnetic-field effects all give rise to distinct physical phenomena. In the absence of any external magnetic field, interesting spin orderings are observed in the ground state of the electron crystal in various two-dimensional lattices. In particular, two-dimensional bipartite lattices are shown not to lead necessarily to an antiferromagnetic ground state. In the quantum Hall effect regime, a strong magnetic field introduces energy and length scales. The magnetic field quenches the kinetic energy and poses constraints on how the electrons may correlate with each other. Care is taken to ensure the appropriate translational properties of the wave function when the system is in a uniform magnetic field. We have examined the exchange, intra-Landau-level correlation as well as Landau-level-mixing effects with various variational wave functions. We also determine their dependences on the experimental parameters such as the carrier effective mass at a modulation-doped semiconductor heterojunction. Our results, when combined with some recent calculations for the energy of the fractional quantum Hall liquid including Landau-level-mixing, show quantitatively that in going from n doping to p doping in GaAs/Alx${\mathrm{Ga}}_{1\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}\mathit{x}}$As heterojunction systems, the crossover filling factor from the fractional quantum Hall liquid to the Wigner crystal changes from filling factor \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\sim}1/5 to \ensuremath{\nu}\ensuremath{\sim}1/3. This lends strong support to the claim that the observed reentrant insulating phases around \ensuremath{\nu}=1/5 for n-doped and around \ensuremath{\nu}=1/3 for p-doped high-mobility samples are primarily caused by electron-electron interaction effects. We discuss the possible implications of our theoretical results for some recent experiments carried out in the quantum Hall regime in search of the electron solid.
We study the transition of the interacting two-dimensional electron gas at high magnetic field from a low-density Wigner crystal to a higher-density correlated state which exhibits the fractionally quantized Hall effect. The phase transition is precipitated by a condensation of ring-exchange processes, which by nature of their sensitivity to enclosed magnetic flux allow for especially low-energy exchange condensates at certain values of the Landau-level filling factor, \ensuremath{\nu}=${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{i}$. In the condensate, the exchanges mediate a logarithmic potential between local-density fluctuations, leading to a cusp in the ground-state energy as a function of \ensuremath{\Vert}\ensuremath{\nu}-${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{i}$\ensuremath{\Vert} in the vicinity of a preferred state. In addition, we derive quasiparticle excitations of sharp fractional charge which are analogous to the excitations derived by Laughlin.
We propose a ground-state trial wave function for a two-dimensional Wigner crystal in a strong perpendicular magnetic field. The wave function includes Laughlin-Jastrow correlations between electron pairs, and may be interpreted as a crystal state of composite fermions or composite bosons. Treating the power m of the Laughlin-Jastrow factor as a variational parameter, we use quantum Monte Carlo simulations to compute the energy of these new states. We find that our wave functions have lower energy than existing crystalline wave functions in the lowest Landau level. Our results are consistent with experimental observations of the filling factor at which the transition between the fractional quantum Hall liquid and the Wigner crystal occurs for electron systems. Exchange contributions to the wave functions are estimated quantitatively and shown to be negligible for sufficiently small filling factors.
Motivated by the structure of the quasiparticle wavefunction in the composite fermion (CF) theory for fractional quantum Hall filling factor [Formula: see text] (m odd), I consider a suitable quasiparticle operator in differential form, as a modified form of Laughlin's quasiparticle operator, that reproduces quasiparticle wave function as predicted in the CF theory, without a priori assumption of the presence of CFs. I further consider the conjugate of this operator as quasihole operator for obtaining a novel quasihole wave function for 1/m state. Each of these wave functions is interpreted as expelling an electron into a different Hilbert subspace from the original Hilbert space of the Laughlin condensate while still maintaining its correlation (although changed) with the electrons in the condensate such that the expelled electron behaves as a CF with respect to the electrons in the condensate. With this interpretation, I show that the ground state wavefunctions for general states at filling fractions [Formula: see text], respectively, can be constructed as coherent superposition of n coupled Laughlin condensates and their 'conjugates', formed at different Hilbert subspaces. The corresponding wave functions, specially surprising for [Formula: see text] sequence of states, are identical with those proposed in the theory of noninteracting CFs. The states which were considered as fractional quantum Hall effect of interacting CFs, can also be treated in the same footing as for the prominent sequences of states describing as the coupled condensates among which one is a non-Laughlin condensate in a different Hilbert subspace. Further, I predict that the half filling of the lowest Landau level is a quantum critical point for phase transition between two topologically distinct phases each corresponding to a family of states: one consists of large number of coupled Laughlin condensates of filling factor 1/3 and the other corresponds to large number of coupled conjugate Laughlin condensates of filling factor 1, which may be distinguished, respectively, by the absence and presence of upstream edge modes.
The formalism introduced in a previous paper is used for discussing the Coulomb interaction of many electrons moving in two space-dimensions in the presence of a strong magnetic field. The matrix element of the Coulomb interaction is evaluated in the new basis, whose states are invariant under discrete translations (up to a gauge transformation). This paper is devoted to the case of low filling factor, thus we limit ourselves to the lowest Landau level and to spins all oriented along the magnetic field. For the case of filling factor νf = 1/u we give an Ansatz on the state of many electrons which provides a good approximated solution of the Hartree–Fock equation. For general filling factor νf = u′/u a trial state is given which converges very rapidly to a solution of the self-consistent equation. We generalize the Hartree–Fock equation by considering some correlation: all quantum states are allowed for the u′ electrons with the same translation quantum numbers. Numerical results are given for the mean energy and the energy bands, for some values of the filling factor (νf = 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, 3/4, 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5). Our results agree numerically with the Charge Density Wave approach. The boundary conditions are shown to be very important: only large systems (degeneracy of Landau level over 200) are not affected by the boundaries. Therefore results obtained on small scale systems are somewhat unreliable. The relevance of the results for the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect is briefly discussed.