Resistively detected nuclear magnetic resonance is used to measure the Knight shift of the As nuclei and determine the electron spin polarization of the fractional quantum Hall states of the second Landau level. We show that the 5/2 state is fully polarized within experimental error, thus confirming a fundamental assumption of the Moore-Read theory. We measure the electron heating under radio frequency excitation, and show that we are able to detect NMR at electron temperatures down to 30 mK.
We report on results of numerical studies of the spin polarization of the half filled second Landau level, which corresponds to the fractional quantum Hall state at filling factor $ u=5/2$. Our studies are performed using both exact diagonalization and Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) on the sphere. We find that for the Coulomb interaction the exact finite-system ground state is fully polarized, for shifts corresponding to both the Moore-Read Pfaffian state and its particle-hole conjugate (anti-Pfaffian). This result is found to be robust against small variations of the interaction. The low-energy excitation spectrum is consistent with spin-wave excitations of a fully-magnetized ferromagnet.
The fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect at filling factor v = 5/2 has recently come under close scrutiny, as it may possess quasi-particle excitations obeying nonabelian statistics, a property sought for topologically protected quantum operations. Yet, its microscopic origin remains unidentified, and candidate model wave functions include those with undesirable abelian statistics. Here we report direct measurements of the electron spin polarization of the v = 5/2 FQH state using resistively detected nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). We find the system to be fully polarized, which unambiguously rules out the most-likely abelian contender and thus lends strong support for the v = 5/2 state being nonabelian. Our measurements reveal an intrinsically different nature of interaction in the first-excited Landau level underlying the physics at v = 5/2.
We study the nature of the u=5/2 quantum Hall state in wide quantum wells under the mixing of electronic subbands and Landau levels. We introduce a general method to analyze the Moore-Read Pfaffian state and its particle-hole conjugate, the anti-Pfaffian, under periodic boundary conditions in a quartered Brillouin zone scheme containing both even and odd numbers of electrons. We examine the rotational quantum numbers on the torus, and show spontaneous breaking of the particle-hole symmetry can be observed in finite-size systems. In the presence of electronic-subband and Landau-level mixing the particle-hole symmetry is broken in such a way that the anti-Pfaffian is unambiguously favored, and becomes more robust in the vicinity of a transition to the compressible phase, in agreement with recent experiments.
We report a reliable method to estimate the disorder broadening parameter from the scaling of the gaps of the even and major odd denominator fractional quantum Hall states of the second Landau level. We apply this technique to several samples of vastly different densities and grown in different MBE chambers. Excellent agreement is found between the estimated intrinsic and numerically obtained energy gaps for the $ u=5/2$ fractional quantum Hall state. Futhermore, we quantify, for the first time, the dependence of the intrinsic gap at $ u=5/2$ on Landau level mixing.
The Fibonacci topological order is the simplest platform for a universal topological quantum computer, consisting of a single type of non-Abelian anyon, $tau$, with fusion rule $tautimestau=1+tau$. While it has been proposed that the anyon spectrum of the $ u=12/5$ fractional quantum Hall state includes a Fibonacci sector, a dynamical picture of how a pure Fibonacci state may emerge in a quantum Hall system has been lacking. Here we use recently proposed non-Abelian dualities to construct a Fibonacci state of bosons at filling $ u=2$ starting from a trilayer of integer quantum Hall states. Our parent theory consists of bosonic composite vortices coupled to fluctuating $U(2)$ gauge fields, which is related to the standard theory of Laughlin quasiparticles by duality. The Fibonacci state is obtained by clustering the composite vortices between the layers, along with flux attachment, a procedure reminiscent of the clustering picture of the Read-Rezayi states. We further use this framework to motivate a wave function for the Fibonacci fractional quantum Hall state.