Pfaffians Across Realms: From Non-Abelian Quantum Hall Fluids to Neural Quantum States

Alexander Sirota, Sharmistha Sahoo, Gil Young Cho +1 more

The Pfaffian fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states are incompressible non-Abelian topological fluids present in a half-filled electron Landau level, where there is a balanced population of electrons and holes. They give rise to half-integral quantum Hall plateaus that divide critical transitions between integer quantum Hall (IQH) states. On the other hand, there are Abelian FQH states, such as the Laughlin state, that can be understood using partons, which are fermionic divisions of the electron. In this paper, we propose a family of incompressible paired parton FQH states at filling $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{1}{6}$ (modulo 1) that emerge from critical transitions between IQH states and Abelian FQH states at filling $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{1}{3}$ (modulo 1). These paired parton states are originated from a half-filled parton Landau level, where there is an equal amount of partons and holes. They generically support Ising-type anyonic quasiparticle excitations and carry non-Abelian Pfaffian topological orders (TO) for partons. We prove the principal existence of these paired parton states using exactly solvable interacting arrays of electronic wires under a magnetic field. Moreover, we establish a notion of particle-hole (PH) symmetry for partons and relate the PH symmetric parton Pfaffian TO with the gapped symmetric surface TO of a fractional topological insulator in three dimensions.

Jürg Martin Fröhlich, Urban M. Studer, E. Thiran

Jürg Martin Fröhlich, A. Zee

Xiangyu Ma, Kehuang Chen, Yuntian Gu +5 more

Fractional quantum Hall systems host strongly correlated topological phases with potential applications in topological quantum computation, yet identifying their microscopic ground states remains challenging because competing phases are often nearly degenerate and Landau-level mixing is difficult to treat. Here, we introduce a symmetry-adapted neural-network wavefunction that describes Abelian and non-Abelian states while incorporating all Landau levels. The method accurately captures composite-fermion liquids and the emergence of Wigner crystallization at low filling. When the first Landau level is partially filled, finite-size overlaps and entanglement spectra provide evidence consistent with $\bar{2}^{k}1^{k+1}$-type parton phases at $ν=4/3$ and $7/5$, while the $ν=3/2$ state exhibits anti-Pfaffian-like entanglement structure. These results demonstrate that neural-network wavefunctions offer a flexible framework for studying competing topological orders in fractional quantum Hall systems.

Michael R. Peterson, S. Das Sarma

We examine the quantum phase diagram of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) in the lowest two Landau levels in half-filled bilayer structures as a function of tunneling strength and layer separation, i.e., we revisit the lowest Landau-level filling factor 1/2 bilayer problem and make predictions involving bilayers in the half-filled second Landau level (i.e., filling factor 5/2). Using numerical exact diagonalization we investigate the important question of whether this system supports a FQHE described by the non-Abelian Moore-Read Pfaffian state in the strong-tunneling regime. In the lowest Landau level, we find that although, in principle, increasing (decreasing) tunneling strength (layer separation) could lead to a transition from the Abelian two-component Halperin 331 to non-Abelian one-component Moore-Read Pfaffian state, the FQHE excitation gap is relatively small in the lowest Landau level Pfaffian regime, and we establish that all so far observed FQHE states in half-filled lowest Landau level bilayers are most likely described by the Abelian Halperin 331 state. In the second Landau level we make the prediction that bilayer structures would manifest two distinct branches of incompressible FQHE corresponding to the Abelian 331 state (at moderate to low tunneling and large layer separation) and the non-Abelian Moore-Read Pfaffian state (at large tunneling and small layer separation). The observation of these two FQHE branches and the possible quantum phase transition between them will be compelling evidence supporting the existence of the non-Abelian Moore-Read Pfaffian state in the second Landau level. We discuss our results in the context of existing experiments and theoretical works.

Csaba Tőke, Nicolas Regnault, Jainendra K. Jain