We study a class of ansatz wave functions in which composite fermions form two correlated "partitions." These "bipartite" composite fermion states are demonstrated to be very accurate for electrons in a strong magnetic field interacting via a short-range 3-body interaction potential over a broad range of filling factors. Furthermore, this approach gives accurate approximations for the exact Coulomb ground state at 2+3/5 and 2+4/7 and is thus a promising candidate for the observed fractional quantum Hall states at the hole conjugate fractions at 2+2/5 and 2+3/7.
We study a class of ansatz wave functions in which composite fermions form two correlated "partitions." These "bipartite" composite fermion states are demonstrated to be very accurate for electrons in a strong magnetic field interacting via a short-range 3-body interaction potential over a broad range of filling factors. Furthermore, this approach gives accurate approximations for the exact Coulomb ground state at 2+3/5 and 2+4/7 and is thus a promising candidate for the observed fractional quantum Hall states at the hole conjugate fractions at 2+2/5 and 2+3/7.
Materials exhibiting exotic quantum phenomena at a macroscopic level are of great
interest because of its intrinsic value to Physics, and also because of its potential
applications in technology. Strongly correlated electronic systems form interesting
examples of these. Exploring them calls for a good understanding of its physics,
and development of new tools that are applicable to their analysis. Robustness
of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) makes it an ideal stage to study
strongly correlated electron systems. The complexity of the FQHE problem stems
directly from the strong interactions between the constituent particles and not
from the specific nature of the material it is implemented in. This work attempts
to gain a theoretical description of some of the less understood aspects of FQHE.
FQHE in the lowest Landau level is well understood using the theory of weakly
interacting emergent particles called composite fermions. Composite fermions
formed in the second Landau level however appear to be strongly interacting.
Of particular interest is the FQHE at 2 + 1/2 filling fraction, where the many body
ground state is believed to be described by a paired state of composite fermions,
represented by the Pfaffian wavefunction. Based on predicted properties of its
excitations, there has been proposals for implementing topological quantum com-
putations in this system. However a good understanding of the nature of these
excitations is still lacking.
This thesis introduces a class of many body wavefunctions called “bipartite
composite fermion states” that provide a unified description of all excitations of the
paired state at 5/2. In the bipartite composite fermion (BCF) picture, constituent
composite fermions split into two partitions which are correlated to each other.
Within each partition, they fill the lowest composite fermion Landau level of its
partition.
Properties of the BCF state can now be related to the properties of the individual partitions, which are well understood in terms of the composite fermion
theory. In particular, we show that the excitations of BCF states are obtained by
creating excitations in the individual partitions. The paired state with odd number of composite fermions should have an unpaired composite fermion. The BCF
model predicts that this unpaired composite fermion behaves as an exciton in the
quasiparticle and quasihole are in separate partitions. We confirm this prediction
numerically in finite size systems. Generalizations of bipartite composite fermion
functions to other filling fractions especially 2 + 4/7 and 2 + 3/5 are also studied.
Idea of bipartite composite fermions can be generalized to the case of more
partitions. Specifically, we look at tripartite composite fermion states which are
similar to the bipartite states, except that these have three correlated partitions
instead of two. Tripartite states have a filling fraction of ν = 3/5, and its particle
hole conjugate is a candidate wavefunction for describing the ν = 2 + 2/5…
The Read-Rezayi wave function is one of the candidates for the fractional quantum Hall effect at filling fraction $\ensuremath{\nu}=2+⅗$, and thereby also its hole conjugate at 2+⅖. We study a general class of tripartite composite fermion wave functions, which reduce to the Rezayi-Read ground state and quasiholes for appropriate quantum numbers, but also allow a construction of wave functions for quasiparticles and neutral excitations by analogy to the standard composite fermion theory. We present numerical evidence in finite systems that these trial wave functions capture well the low energy physics of a four-body model interaction. We also compare the tripartite composite fermion wave functions with the exact Coulomb eigenstates at 2+⅗, and find reasonably good agreement. The ground state as well as several excited states of the four-body interaction are seen to evolve adiabatically into the corresponding Coulomb states for N=15 particles. These results support the plausibility of the Read-Rezayi proposal for the 2+⅖ and 2+⅗ fractional quantum Hall effect. However, certain other proposals also remain viable, and further study of excitations and edge states will be necessary for a decisive establishment of the physical mechanism of these fractional quantum Hall states.
We investigate the feasibility of many candidate quantum Hall states for two-component bosons in the lowest Landau level. We identify interactions for which spin-singlet incompressible states occur at filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/3$, 4/5, and 4/3, and partially spin-polarized states at filling factors 3/4 and 3/2, where ``spin'' serves as a generic label for the two components. We study ground states, excitations, edge states, and entanglement spectrum for systems with up to 16 bosons and construct explicit trial wave functions to clarify the underlying physics. The composite fermion theory very accurately describes the ground states as well as excitations at $\ensuremath{\nu}=2/3$, 4/5, and 3/4, although it is less satisfactory for the $\ensuremath{\nu}=3/2$ state. For $\ensuremath{\nu}=4/3$ a ``non-Abelian spin-singlet'' state, which is the exact ground state of a three-body contact interaction, has been proposed to occur even for a two-body contact interaction; our trial wave functions are very accurate for the excitations of the three-body interaction, but they do not describe the excitations of the two-body interaction very well. Instead, we find that the $\ensuremath{\nu}=4/3$ state is more likely to be a spin-singlet state of reverse-flux-attached composite fermions at filling ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=4$. We also consider incompressible states at integral filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ and 2. The incompressible state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ is shown to be well described by the parton-based Jain spin-singlet wave function, and the incompressible state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=2$ as the spin-singlet state of reverse-flux-attached composite fermions at ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=2$, which provides an example of the bosonic integer topological phase.
By developing an algorithm for evaluating the basis states for the composite fermions with negative effective magnetic field, we perform the composite-fermion-diagonalization study for the fully spin-polarized fractional quantum Hall states at the filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=3/10$, 4/13, and 5/17 in the range $2/7<\ensuremath{\nu}<1/3$. These observed states correspond to a partially filled second effective Landau level, for the composite fermions carrying four vortices, with filling factor $\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}=1/2$, 1/3, and 2/3, respectively, analogous to the previously studied states of composite fermions with two attached vortices in the range $1/3<\ensuremath{\nu}<2/5$. We show that the character of these states in the range $2/7<\ensuremath{\nu}<1/3$ replicates the same for the states in the range $1/3<\ensuremath{\nu}<2/5$ having identical $\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}$: chiral p-wave pairing with an anti-Pfaffian correlation of composite fermions carrying six quantized vortices produces an incompressible state at $\ensuremath{\nu}=3/10$; an unconventional interaction between composite fermions, resulting from the suppression of fermion pairs with relative angular momentum three and producing the fractional quantum Hall effect of composite fermions in the second effective Landau level with $\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}=1/3$ and its particle-hole conjugate filling factor 2/3, reproduces incompressible states at 4/13 and 5/17 filling factors. We further estimate the thermodynamic limit of the ground-state energies and calculate the lowest energy gap for the neutral collective excitations of these states.
Exact diagonalization of a two-dimensional electron gas in a strong magnetic field in the disk geometry shows that there exists a filling-factor range in the second Landau level where the states significantly differ from those in the lowest Landau level. We show that the difference arises because the interaction between composite fermions is not negligible in higher Landau levels, as indicated by a substantial mixing between composite-fermion Landau-like levels, or $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$ levels. We find that the exact ground state is well reproduced by composite-fermion theory with $\ensuremath{\Lambda}$-level mixing incorporated at the lowest level of approximation. Using the same variational approach in the spherical geometry we estimate the excitation gap at filling 1∕3 in the second Landau level (which corresponds to 7∕3 of experiment).
The particle-hole (PH) symmetry of electrons is an exact symmetry of the electronic Hamiltonian confined to a specific Landau level, and its interplay with the formation of composite fermions has attracted much attention of late. We investigate an emergent symmetry in the fractional quantum Hall effect, namely, the PH symmetry of composite fermions, which relates states at composite fermion filling factors ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=n+\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}$ and ${\ensuremath{\nu}}^{*}=n+1\ensuremath{-}\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}$, where the integer n is the $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$-level index and $0\ensuremath{\le}\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}\ensuremath{\le}1$. Detailed calculations using the microscopic theory of composite fermions demonstrate the following for low-lying $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ levels (small n): (i) The two-body interaction between composite-fermion particles is very similar, apart from a constant additive term and an overall scale factor, to that between composite-fermion holes in the same $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ level; and (ii) the three-body interaction for composite fermions is an order of magnitude smaller than the two-body interaction. Taken together, these results imply an approximate PH symmetry for composite fermions in low $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ levels, which is also supported by exact-diagonalization studies and available experiments. This symmetry, which relates states at electron filling factors $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{n+\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}{2(n+\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}})\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1}$ and $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{n+1\ensuremath{-}\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}}}{2(n+1\ensuremath{-}\overline{\ensuremath{\nu}})\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1}$, is not present in the original Hamiltonian and owes its existence entirely to the formation of composite fermions. With increasing $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$-level index, the two-body and three-body pseudopotentials become comparable, but at the same time they both diminish in magnitude, indicating that the interaction between composite fermions becomes weak as we approach $\ensuremath{\nu}=1/2$.