The search for non-Abelian quantum Hall states in the second Landau level is narrowed to the range of filling factors 7/3<ν_e<8/3. In this range, the analysis of energy spectra and correlation functions, calculated including finite width and Landau level mixing, supports the prominent non-Abelian candidates at ν_e=5/2 (Moore--Read) and 12/5 (Read--Rezayi). Outside of it, the four-flux noninteracting composite fermion model is validated. The borderline ν_e=7/3 state is adiabatically connected to the Laughlin liquid, but its short-range correlations and charge excitations are different.
We study theoretically the dispersion of a single quasiparticle or quasihole of the fractional quantum Hall effect, obtained by injecting or removing a composite fermion. By comparing to a free fermion system, we estimate the regime of validity of the Landau-Fermi-liquid-type description and deduce the Landau mass.
Fluctuations of the Chern-Simons gauge field in the composite Fermi liquid description of the half-filled Landau level are pair breaking in all angular momentum channels. For short-range electron-electron interactions these fluctuations are sufficiently strong to drive any T=0 pairing transition first order. For Coulomb interactions these fluctuations are weaker and a continuous transition is possible.
The ground state cohesive energies per electron of the composite fermion (CF) Fermi sea, the Laughlin state and the charge density wave (CDW) at higher Landau levels (LLs) are computed. It is shown that whereas for $n\geq 2$ LL, the CDW state is generally more energetically preferable than those of the CF liquid and the Laughlin liquid, the $ν=4+1/6$ CF liquid state unexpectedly has lower ground state energy than that of the CDW state. We suggest this CF liquid between the Wigner crystal and the bubble phase may lead to the crossover from the normal integer quantum Hall liquid to the novel re-…
Previously we have demonstrated that, on a torus, the abelian quantum hall liquid is adiabatically connected to a charge density wave as the smaller dimension of the torus is varied. In this work we extend this result to the non-abelian bosonic Hall state. The outcome of these works is the realization that the paradigms of quantum number fractionalization in one dimension (polyacetylene) and two dimensions (fractional quantum Hall effect) are in fact equivalent.
The quantum Hall phase diagram of the half-filled bilayer system in the second Landau level is studied as a function of tunneling and layer separation using exact diagonalization. We make the striking prediction that bilayer structures would manifest two distinct branches of incompressible fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) corresponding to the Abelian 331 state (at moderate to low tunneling and large layer separation) and the non-Abelian Pfaffian state (at large tunneling and small layer separation). The observation of these two FQHE branches and the quantum phase transition between them w…
We construct Landau-Ginzburg effective field theories for fractional quantum Hall states -- such as the Pfaffian state -- which exhibit non-Abelian statistics. These theories rely on a Meissner construction which increases the level of a non-Abelian Chern-Simons theory while simultaneously projecting out the unwanted degrees of freedom of a concomitant enveloping Abelian theory. We describe this construction in the context of a system of bosons at Landau level filling factor $ν=1$, where the non-Abelian symmetry is a dynamically-generated SU(2) continuous extension of the discrete particle-hol…
The electron-electron interaction in the Landau levels of bilayer graphene is markedly different from that of conventional semiconductors such as GaAs. We show that in the zeroth Landau level of bilayer graphene, in the orbital which is dominated by the non-relativistic second Landau level wave function, by tuning the magnetic field a topological quantum phase transition from an Abelian composite fermion to a non-Abelian parton fractional quantum Hall state can be induced at filling factors $1/2, ~2/5$ and $3/7$. The parton states host exotic anyons that can potentially be utilized to store an…
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 new 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 th…
On the basis of energy calculations we investigate the competition between quantum-liquid and electron-solid phases in the Landau levels n=1,2, and 3 as a function of their partial filling factor. Whereas the quantum-liquid phases are stable only in the vicinity of quantized values 1/(2s+1) of the partial filling factor, an electron solid in the form of a triangular lattice of clusters with a few number of electrons (bubble phase) is energetically favorable between these fillings. This alternation of electron-solid phases, which are insulating because they are pinned by the residual impurities…
We investigate the competition between electron-solid and quantum-liquid phases in graphene, which arise in partially filled Landau levels. The differences in the wave function describing the electrons in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field in graphene with respect to the conventional semiconductors, such as GaAs, can be captured in a form factor which carries the Landau level index. This leads to a quantitative difference in the electron-solid and -liquid energies. For the lowest Landau level, there is no difference in the wave function of relativistic and non-relativistic systems.…
Experiments show that at even denominator fractions (EDFs) ($ν=1/2, 3/4, 3/2$,...) the two-dimensional electron gas in a strong magnetic field becomes compressible, has no energy gap, and demonstrates the presence of an ostensible Fermi surface. Since this phenomenon results from a minimization of the interaction, rather than the kinetic energy, the EDF states might well exhibit deviations from a conventional Fermi liquid. We show that impurity scattering at EDFs and its interference with electron-electron and electron-phonon interactions provide examples of intrinsically non-Fermi-liquid tran…
Interactions between the constituents of a condensed matter system can drive it through a plethora of different phases due to many-body effects. A prominent platform for this type of behavior is a two-dimensional electron system in a magnetic field, which evolves intricately through various gaseous, liquid and solids phases governed by Coulomb interaction. Here we report on the experimental observation of a phase transition between the Laughlin liquid of composite fermions and the adjacent insulating phase of a magnetic field-induced Wigner solid. The experiments are performed in the lowest La…
We study charged spin-1/2 particles in two dimensions, subject to a perpendicular non-Abelian magnetic field. Specializing to a choice of vector potential that is spatially constant but non-Abelian, we investigate the Landau level spectrum in planar and spherical geometry, paying particular attention to the role of the total angular momentum J = L +S. After this we show that the adiabatic insertion of non-Abelian flux in a spin-polarized quantum Hall state leads to the formation of charged spin-textures, which in the simplest cases can be identified with quantum Hall Skyrmions.
Magnetotransport measurements were performed in a ultra-high mobility GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well of density $\sim 3.0 \times 10^{11}$ $cm^{-2}$. The temperature dependence of the magnetoresistance $R_{xx}$ was studied in detail in the vicinity of $ν={9/2}$. In particular, we discovered new minima in $R_{xx}$ at filling factor $ν\simeq 4{1/5}$ and $4{4/5}$, but only at intermediate temperatures $80\lesssim T\lesssim 120$ mK. We interpret these as evidence for a fractional quantum Hall liquid forming in the N=2 Landau level and competing with bubble and Wigner crystal phases favored at lower tempe…
What is the fate of the ground state of a two-dimensional electron system (2DES) at very low Landau level filling factors ($ν$) where interaction reigns supreme? An ordered array of electrons, the so-called Wigner crystal, has long been believed to be the answer. It was in fact the search for the elusive Wigner crystal that led to the discovery of an unexpected, incompressible liquid state, namely the fractional quantum Hall state at $ν=1/3$. Understanding the competition between the liquid and solid ground states has since remained an active field of fundamental research. Here we report exper…
We present results of extensive numerical calculations on the ground state of electrons in the first excited (n=1) Landau level with Coulomb interactions, and including non-zero thickness effects, for filling factors 12/5 and 13/5 in the torus geometry. In a region that includes these experimentally-relevant values, we find that the energy spectrum and the overlaps with the trial states support the previous hypothesis that the system is in the non-Abelian k = 3 liquid phase we introduced in a previous paper.
Quasiparticles, which obey non abelian statistics, were predicted to exist in different physical systems, but are yet to be observed directly. Possible candidate states, which are expected to support such quasiparticles, are the ν=8/3, ν=5/2 and ν=7/3 fractional quantum Hall states (in the second Landau level). The non abelian quasiparticles are expected to carry charge and a unique form of a chiral neutral edge mode. Recent measurements in the ν=5/2 state detected quasiparticle charge e/4 and an upstream (opposite to charge transport) chiral neutral mode; both agreeing with a non abelian anti…
We study non-equilibrium noise in the tunnelling current between the edges of a quantum Hall liquid in the Pfaffian state, which is a strong candidate for the plateau at $ν=5/2$. To first non-vanishing order in perturbation theory (in the tunneling amplitude) we find that one can extract the value of the fractional charge of the tunnelling quasiparticles. We note however that no direct information about non-abelian statistics can be retrieved at this level. If we go to higher-order in the perturbative calculation of the non-equilibrium shot noise, we find effects due to non-Abelian statistics.…
Topological phases of matter became a new standard to classify quantum systems in many cases, yet key quantities like the quantum geometric tensor providing local information about topological properties are still experimentally hard to access. In non-Abelian systems this accessibility to geometric properties can be even more restrictive due to the degeneracy of the states. We propose universal protocols to determine quantum geometric properties in non-Abelian systems. First, we show that for a weak resonant driving of the local parameters the coherent Rabi oscillations are related to the quan…
The purpose of this paper is threefold: First of all the topological aspects of the Landau Hamiltonian are reviewed in the light (and with the jargon) of theory of topological insulators. In particular it is shown that the Landau Hamiltonian has a generalized even time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Secondly, a new tool for the computation of the topological numbers associated with each Landau level is introduced. The latter is obtained by combining the Dixmier trace and the (resolvent of the) harmonic oscillator. Finally, these results are extended to models with non-Abelian magnetic fields. Two mo…
Landau's phenomenological theory of Fermi liquids is a fundamental paradigm in many-body physics that has been remarkably successful in explaining the properties of a wide range of interacting fermion systems, such as liquid helium-3, nuclear matter, and electrons in metals. The d-dimensional boundaries of (d+1)-dimensional topological phases of matter such as quantum Hall systems and topological insulators provide new types of many-fermion systems that are topologically distinct from conventional d-dimensional many-fermion systems. We construct a phenomenological Landau theory for the two-dim…
Utilizing the realistic continuum description of twisted bilayer MoTe2 and many-body exact diagonalization calculation, we establish that the second moiré band of twisted bilayer MoTe2, at a small twist angle of approximately 2°, serves as an optimal platform for achieving the long-sought non-Abelian fractional quantum anomalous Hall states without the need for external magnetic fields. Across a wide parameter range, our exact diagonalization calculations reveal that the half-filled second moiré band demonstrates the ground state degeneracy and spectral flows, which are consistent with the pfa…
We examine the effect of Landau level mixing on the braiding statistics of quasiparticles of abelian and nonabelian quantum Hall states. While path dependent geometric phases can perturb the abelian part of the statistics, we find that the nonabelian properties remain unchanged to an accuracy that is exponentially small in the distance between quasiparticles.
We present a theory of spontaneous Fermi surface deformations for half-filled Landau levels (filling factors of the form $ν=2n+1/2$). We assume the half-filled level to be in a compressible, Fermi liquid state with a circular Fermi surface. The Landau level projection is incorporated via a modified effective electron-electron interaction and the resulting band structure is described within the Hartree-Fock approximation. We regulate the infrared divergences in the theory and probe the intrinsic tendency of the Fermi surface to deform through Pomeranchuk instabilities. We find that the correspo…
We consider the two lowest Landau levels at half filling. In the higher Landau level (nu =5/2), we find a first order phase transition separating a compressible striped phase from a paired quantum Hall state, which is identified as the Moore-Read state. The critical point is very near the Coulomb potential and the transition can be driven by increasing the width of the electron layer. We find a much weaker transition (either second order or a crossover) from pairing to the composite fermion Fermi liquid behavior. A very similar picture is obtained for the lowest Landau level but the transition…
We show in this paper that thermopower is enhanced in non-Abelian quantum Hall liquids under appropriate conditions. This is because thermopower measures entropy per electron in the clean limit, while the degeneracy and entropy associated with non-Abelian quasiparticles enhance entropy when they are present. Thus thermopower can potentially probe non-Abelian nature of the quasiparticles, and measure their quantum dimension.
We point out that the zero-energy Landau level of Dirac fermions in graphene can be, in the presence of a repulsive electron-electron interaction, split into two (levels) associated with a "bond ordering" formation having a "Kekule pattern", which respects the chiral symmetry. Since the Kekule pattern has a three-fold degeneracy, domain structures are implied, for which we show that in-gap states localized along the domain boundaries exist as topological states. Based on this a possibility of a quantum-liquid ground state of graphene in magnetic fields is discussed.
The recently discovered anisotropy of the longitudinal resistance of two-dimensional electrons near half filling of high Landau levels is found to persist to much higher temperatures T when a large in-plane magnetic field B|| is applied. Under these conditions we find that the longitudinal resistivity scales quasi-linearly with B||/T. These observations support the notion that the onset of anisotropy at B||=0 does not reflect the spontaneous development of charge density modulations but may instead signal an isotropic-to-nematic liquid crystal phase transition.
It is an important open problem to understand the landscape of non-Abelian fractional quantum Hall phases which can be obtained starting from physically motivated theories of Abelian composite particles. We show that progress on this problem can be made using recently proposed non-Abelian bosonization dualities in 2+1 dimensions, which morally relate $U(N)_k$ and $SU(k)_{-N}$ Chern-Simons-matter theories. The advantage of these dualities is that regions of the phase diagram which may be obscure on one side of the duality can be accessed by condensing local operators on the other side. Starting…
The paradigm of Landau's Fermi liquid theory has been challenged with the finding of a strongly interacting Fermi liquid that cannot be adiabatically connected to a non-interacting system. A spin-1 two-channel Kondo impurity with anisotropy D has a quantum phase transition between two topologically different Fermi liquids with a peak (dip) in the Fermi level for D < Dc (D > Dc). Extending this theory to general multi-orbital problems with finite magnetic field, we reinterpret in a unified and consistent fashion several experimental studies of iron phthalocyanine molecules on Au(111) that were …
Using projective construction, a generalized parton construction, we construct many non-Abelian quantum Hall (QH) states, which include the Pfaffian state at filling fraction $ν=1/2$. The projective construction allows us to calculate the bulk and the edge effective theory for the constructed QH state. We illustrate how to use the bulk effective theory to calculate the ground state degeneracy of non-Abelian QH liquids on torus. We point out that the full description of the effective theory requires both the effective Lagrangian and the definition of electron operators. The latter generates all…
We establish the existence of a chiral spin liquid (CSL) as the exact ground state of the Kitaev model on a decorated honeycomb lattice, which is obtained by replacing each site in the familiar honeycomb lattice with a triangle. The CSL state spontaneously breaks time reversal symmetry but preserves other symmetries. There are two topologically distinct CSLs separated by a quantum critical point. Interestingly, vortex excitations in the topologically nontrivial (Chern number $\pm 1$) CSL obey non-Abelian statistics.
We propose a hydrodynamics theory of collective quantum Hall states, which describes incompressible liquids, hexatic liquid crystals, a bubble solid and a Wigner crystal states within a unified framework. The structure of the theory is uniquely determined by the space-time symmetry, and a symmetry with respect to static shear deformations. In agreement with recent experiments the theory predicts two gapped collective modes for incompressible liquids. We argue that the presence of the above two modes is a universal property of a magnetized two-dimensional collective liquid.
We use exact numerical diagonalization in the search of fractional quantum Hall states with non-Abelian quasiparticle statistics. For the (most promising) states in a partially filled second Landau level, the search is narrowed to the range of filling factors $7/3 <ν_e<8/3$. In this range, the analysis of energy spectra and correlation functions, calculated including finite width and Landau level mixing, supports the prominent non-Abelian candidates at $ν_e=5/2$ (paired Moore--Read "pfafian" state) and 12/5 (clustered Read--Rezayi "parafermion" state). Outside of this range, the noninteracting…
The transition between the stripe state and the liquid state in a high magnetic field is studied by the density-matrix renormalization-group (DMRG) method. Systematic analysis on the ground state of two-dimensional electrons in the lowest Landau level shows that the transition from the stripe state to the liquid state at v=3/8 is caused by a reduction of repulsive interaction around r=3. The same reduction of the interaction also stabilizes the incompressible liquid states at v=1/3 and 2/5, which shows a similarity between the two liquid states at v=3/8 and 1/3. It is also shown that the stron…
We have observed in a low density two-dimensional hole system (2DHS) of extremely high quality (with hole density p=1.6x10^{10} cm^{-2} and mobility μ=0.8x10^6 cm^2/Vs) that, as the 2DHS is continuously tilted with respect to the direction of the magnetic field, the ν=1/3 fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) state is weakened and its magnetoresistivity rises from ~ 0.4 kohm/square in the normal orientation to ~ 180 kohm/square at tilt angle θ\~ 80 degrees. We attribute this phenomenon to the transition of the 2DHS from the FQHE liquid state to the pinned Wigner solid state, and argue that its…
A theory for a Fermi-liquid-like state in a system of charged bosons at filling factor one is developed, working in the lowest Landau level. The approach is based on a representation of the problem as fermions with a system of constraints, introduced by Pasquier and Haldane (unpublished). This makes the system a gauge theory with gauge algebra W_infty. The low-energy theory is analyzed based on Hartree-Fock and a corresponding conserving approximation. This is shown to be equivalent to introducing a gauge field, which at long wavelengths gives an infinite-coupling U(1) gauge theory, without a …
We investigate the coupling between Rydberg states of electrons trapped on a liquid Helium surface and Landau levels induced by a perpendicular magnetic field. We show that this realises a prototype quantum system equivalent to an atom in a cavity, where their coupling strength can be tuned by a parallel magnetic field. We determine experimentally the renormalisation of the atomic transition energies induced by the coupling to the cavity, which can be seen as an analogue of the Lamb shift. When the coupling is sufficiently strong the transition between the ground and first excited Rydberg stat…
We study one dimensional wires with spin-orbit coupling. We show that in the presence of Zeeman field and strong electron-electron interaction a clean wire may form fractional helical liquid states with phenomenology similar to fractional quantum Hall liquids. Most notably, the wire's two terminal conductance is predicted to show fractional quantized conductance plateaus at low electron density. When the system is proximity-coupled to a superconductor, fractional Majorana bound states may be stabilized. We discuss how disorder destabilizes these fractional phases. Possible experimental realiza…
We present a two-dimensional lattice model for quantum spin-1/2 for which the low-energy limit is governed by four flavors of strongly interacting Majorana fermions. We study this low-energy effective theory using two alternative approaches. The first consists of a mean-field approximation. The second consists of a Random Phase approximation (RPA) for the single-particle Green's functions of the Majorana fermions built from their exact forms in a certain one-dimensional limit. The resulting phase diagram consists of two competing chiral phases, one with Abelian and the other with non-Abelian t…
We present a simple approach to calculate the degeneracy and the structure of the ground states of non-abelian quantum Hall (QH) liquids on the torus. Our approach can be applied to any QH liquids (abelian or non-abelian) obtained from the parton construction. We explain our approach by studying a series of examples of increasing complexity. When the effective theory of a non-abelian QH liquid is a non-abelian Chern-Simons (CS) theory, our approach reproduces the well known results for the ground state degeneracy of the CS theory. However, our approach also apply to non-abelian QH liquids whos…
