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Progress of Theoretical Physics Supplement

Coulomb Gas Vertex Operators for the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Gerardo Cristofano, G. Maiella, R. Musto, F. Nicodemi

Published Jan 1, 1992• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A natural description of a 2D system of electrons in a transverse magnetic field is achieved by using Coulomb gas conformal vertex operators. They provide an understanding of the FQHE in terms of quantized vortex excitations with finite energy and fractional charge. Working with doubly periodic boundary conditions, we identify a specific set of vertex operators corresponding to electrons or to anyonic “particles”. Their wave functions at filling ν = 1/m give an irreducible representation of a discrete subgroup of the magnetic translation group and transform covariantly under modular transformations.

DOI
10.1143/ptps.107.195

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A natural description of a 2D system of electrons in a transverse magnetic field is achieved by using Coulomb gas conformal vertex operators. They provide an understanding of the FQHE in terms of quantized vortex excitations with finite energy and fractional charge. Working with doubly periodic boundary conditions, we identify a specific set of vertex operators corresponding to electrons or to anyonic “particles”. Their wave functions at filling ν = 1/m give an irreducible representation of a discrete subgroup of the magnetic translation group and transform covariantly under modular transformations.
The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE), now entering it's fourth decade, continues to draw attention from the condensed matter community. New experiments in recent years are raising hopes that it will be possible to observe quasi-particles with non-abelian anyonic statistics. These particles could form the building blocks of a quantum computer. The quantum Hall states have topologically protected energy gaps to the low-lying set of excitations. This topological order is not a locally measurable quantity but rather a non-local object, and it is one of the keys to it's stability. From an early stage understanding of the FQHE has been facilitate by constructing trial wave functions. The topological classification of these wave functions have given further insight to the nature of the FQHE. An early, and successful, wave function construction for filling fractions ν=p/(2p+1) was that of composite fermions on planar and spherical geometries. Recently, new developments using conformal field theory have made it possible to also construct the full Haldane-Halperin hierarchy wave functions on planar and spherical geometries. In this thesis we extend this construction to a toroidal geometry, i.e. a flat surface with periodic boundary conditions. One of the defining features of topological states of matter in two dimensions is that the ground state is not unique on surfaces with non trivial topology, such as a torus. The archetypical example is the fractional quantum Hall effect, where a state at filling fraction ν=p/q, has at least a q-fold degeneracy on a torus. This has been shown explicitly for a few cases, such as the Laughlin states and the the Moore-Read states, by explicit construction of candidate electron wave functions with good overlap with numerically found states. In this thesis, we construct explicit torus wave functions for a large class of experimentally important quantum liquids, namely the chiral hierarchy states in the lowest Landau level. These states, which includes the prominently observed positive Jain sequence at filling fractions ν=p/(2p+1), are characterized by having boundary modes with only one chirality. Our construction relies heavily on previous work that expressed the hierarchy wave functions on a plane or a sphere in terms of correlation functions in a conformal field theory. This construction can be taken over to the torus when care is taken to ensure correct behaviour under the modular transformations that leave the geometry of the torus unchanged. Our construction solves the long standing problem of engineering torus wave functions for multi-component many-body states. Since the resulting expressions are rather complicated, we have carefully compared the simplest example, that of ν=2/5, with numerically found wave functions. We have found an extremely good overlap for arbitrary values of the modular parameter τ, that describes the geometry of the torus. Having explicit torus wave functions allows us to use the methods developed by Read and Read \\& Rezayi to numerically compute the quantum Hall viscosity. Hall viscosity is conjectured to be a topologically protected macroscopic transport coefficient characterizing the quantum Hall state. It is related to the shift of the same QH-fluid when it is put on a sphere. The good agreement with the theoretical prediction for the 2/5 state strongly suggests that our wave functions encodes all relevant topologically information. We also consider the Hall viscosity in the limit of a very thin torus. There we find that the viscosity changes as we approach the thin torus limit. Because of this we study the Laughlin state in that limit and see how the change in viscosity arises from a change in the Hamiltonian hopping elements. Finally we conclude that there are both qualitative and quantitative difference between the thin and the square torus. Thus, one has to be careful when interpreting results in the thin torus limit.
We follow Fubini's suggestion to use vertex operators for describing electrons and holes in the two-dimensional set-up appropriate for the description of the fractional quantum Hall effect, i.e., on the gauge-fixed magnetic plane. Laughlin's wave function is thus reproduced as the correlator of primary conformal fields, represented as exponentials of a free scalar field. We generalize an Ansatz by Halperin and present a new wave function describing the ground-state and the excited states of a system of unpolarized electrons. We realize these wave functions as correlators of normal-ordered exponentials of two free fields. We also give an explicit representation for the creation operator of an excitation.
A second quantized formalism for electrons confined to a plane in a strong perpendicular magnetic field is constructed using vertex operators. They are seen to arise naturally from a holomorphic representation of Laughlin’s first quantized wave functions, since they have the unique properties of creating coherent states, satisfying anyonic statistics and factorizing matrix elements. While open string vertex operators are sufficient for representing Laughlin’s “ground state” wave functions, it is shown that the vertex operators appearing in the theory of closed strings are needed in order to represent both types of anyonic excitations (quasi-holes and quasi-electrons) which appear in the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect.
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.
The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) occurs at certain magnetic field strengths B*(n) in a two-dimensional electron gas of density n at strong magnetic fields perpendicular to the plane of the electron gas. At these magnetic fields strengths, the system is incompressible, i.e., there is a finite cost in energy for creating charge density fluctuations in the bulk, while the boundary of the electron gas has gapless modes of density waves. The bulk energy gap arises because of the strong electron-electron interactions. While there are very good models for infinite homogeneous systems and for the gapless excitations of the boundary of the electron gas, computational methods to accurately model finite, inhomogeneous systems with more then about ten electrons have not been available until very recently. We will here review an ensemble density functional approach to studying the ground state of large inhomogeneous spin polarized FQHE systems.