Microscopic Description of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect
Pietro Rotondo, Luca Guido Molinari, Piergiorgio Ratti +1 more
After more than three decades the fractional quantum Hall effect still poses challenges to contemporary physics. While many features are phenomenologically understood, a detailed comprehension of its microscopic origin still lacks. Here, we address this problem by showing that the Hamiltonian describing interacting electrons in a strong magnetic field, restricted to the lowest Landau level, can be mapped onto a one-dimensional lattice gas with repulsive interactions. The statistical mechanics of such models leads to interpret the sequence of Hall plateaux as a fractal phase diagram. We derive an expression for the ground states, forming Wigner crystals in the reciprocal lattice of the degenerate Landau states, and predict the form of the fractional plateaux landscape.
•Aug 18, 2015•0 citations