A model interacting Fermi gas and the fractional quantum Hall effect

B. Rosenstein, Israel D. Vagner

Anonymous

Jianshi Zhao, Louis Jacome, Nathan Gemelke

Nicolas Regnault, Joseph Maciejko, Steven Allan Kivelson +1 more

The fractional quantum Hall (FQH) nematic state is a conjectured state of matter in which FQH topological order coexists with spontaneously broken rotation symmetry. Recent experiments on GaAs quantum wells suggest this state, as well as the concomitant isotropic-nematic phase transition, may be realized in a two-dimensional electron gas at certain rational filling factors. Although effective field theories of the FQH nematic state have been constructed, there has been so far no explicit realization of this state as the ground state of a microscopic model of interacting electrons. The authors show via a variational approach and numerical exact diagonalization that tuning Haldane pseudopotentials in a model of interacting electrons in the lowest Landau level induces a quantum phase transition out of the isotropic Laughlin FQH liquid and into the FQH nematic state.

Csaba Tőke, Chuntai Shi, Jainendra K. Jain

There is increasing experimental evidence for fractional quantum Hall effect at filling factor $\ensuremath{\nu}=2+3/8$. Modeling it as a system of composite fermions, we study the problem of interacting composite fermions by a number of methods. In our variational study, we consider the Fermi sea, the Pfaffian paired state, and bubble and stripe phases of composite fermions, and find that the Fermi sea state is favored for a wide range of transverse thickness. However, when we incorporate interactions between composite fermions through composite-fermion diagonalization on systems with up to 25 composite fermions, we find that a gap opens at the Fermi level, suggesting that inter-composite fermion interaction can induce fractional quantum Hall effect at $\ensuremath{\nu}=2+3/8$. The resulting state is seen to be distinct from the Pfaffian wave function.

O. Heinonen, M. I. Lubin, M. D. Johnson

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.