We give a universal description of the mesoscopic effects occurring in fractional quantum Hall disks due to the Aharonov-Bohm flux threading the system. The analysis is based on the exact treatment of the flux within the conformal field theory framework and is relevant for all fractional quantum Hall states whose edge states CFTs are known. As an example we apply this scheme for the parafermion Hall states and extract the main characteristics of the low- and high- temperature asymptotic behavior of the persistent currents.
Using the effective conformal field theory for the quantum Hall edge states we propose a compact and convenient scheme for the computation of the periods, amplitudes, and temperature behavior of the chiral persistent currents and the magnetic susceptibilities in the mesoscopic disk version of the
Zk parafermion quantum Hall states in the second Landau level. Our numerical calculations show that the persistent currents are periodic in the Aharonov--Bohm flux with period exactly one flux quantum and have a diamagnetic nature. In the high-temperature regime their amplitudes decay exponentially with increasing the temperature and the corresponding exponents are universal characteristics of non-Fermi liquids. Our theoretical results for these exponents are in perfect agreement with those extracted from the numerical data and demonstrate that there is in general a nontrivial contribution coming from the neutral sector. We emphasize the crucial role of the nonholomorphic factors, first proposed by Cappelli and Zemba in the context of the conformal field theory partition functions for the quantum Hall states, which ensure the invariance of the annulus partition function under the Laughlin spectral flow.
Applications of conformal field theory to the theory of fractional quantum Hall systems are discussed. In particular, Laughlin's wave function and its cousins are interpreted as conformal blocks in certain rational conformal field theories. Using this point of view a hamiltonian is constructed for electrons for which the ground state is known exactly and whose quasihole excitations have nonabelian statistics; we term these objects “nonabelions”. It is argued that universality classes of fractional quantum Hall systems can be characterized by the quantum numbers and statistics of their excitations. The relation between the order parameter in the fractional quantum Hall effect and the chiral algebra in rational conformal field theory is stressed, and new order parameters for several states are given.