We construct an action for the composite Dirac fermion consistent with symmetries of electrons projected to the lowest Landau level. First we construct a generalization of the $g=2$ electron that gives a smooth massless limit on any curved background. Using the symmetries of the microscopic electron theory in this massless limit we find a number of constraints on any low-energy effective theory. We find that any low-energy description must couple to a geometry which exhibits nontrivial curvature even on flat space-times. Any composite fermion must have an electric dipole moment proportional and orthogonal to the composite fermions wavevector. We construct the effective action for the composite Dirac fermion and calculate the physical stress tensor and current operators for this theory.
We study the effect of electron-electron interaction and spin on electronic and transport properties of gated graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) in a perpendicular magnetic field in the regime of the lowest Landau level (LL). The electron-electron interaction is taken into account using the Hartree and Hubbard approximations, and the conductance of GNRs is calculated on the basis of the recursive Greens function technique within the Landauer formalism. We demonstrate that, in comparison to the one-electron picture, electron-electron interaction leads to the drastic changes in the dispersion relation and structure of propagating states in the regime of the lowest LL showing a formation of the compressible strip and opening of additional conductive channels in the middle of the ribbon. We show that the latter are very sensitive to disorder and get scattered even if the concentration of disorder is moderate. In contrast, the edge states transport is very robust and can not be suppressed even in the presence of a strong spin-flipping.
There is increasing experimental evidence for fractional quantum Hall effect at filling factor $ u=2+3/8$. Modeling it as a system of composite fermions, we study the problem of interacting composite fermions by a number of methods. In our variational study, we consider the Fermi sea, the Pfaffian paired state, and bubble and stripe phases of composite fermions, and find that the Fermi sea state is favored for a wide range of transverse thickness. However, when we incorporate interactions between composite fermions through composite-fermion diagonalization on systems with up to 25 composite fermions, we find that a gap opens at the Fermi level, suggesting that inter-composite fermion interaction can induce fractional quantum Hall effect at $ u=2+3/8$. The resulting state is seen to be distinct from the Pfaffian wave function.
The recent theoretical prediction and experimental realization of topological insulators (TI) has generated intense interest in this new state of quantum matter. The surface states of a three-dimensional (3D) TI such as Bi_2Te_3, Bi_2Se_3 and Sb_2Te_3 consist of a single massless Dirac cones. Crossing of the two surface state branches with opposite spins in the materials is fully protected by the time reversal (TR) symmetry at the Dirac points, which cannot be destroyed by any TR invariant perturbation. Recent advances in thin-film growth have permitted this unique two-dimensional electron system (2DES) to be probed by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS). The intriguing TR symmetry protected topological states were revealed in STM experiments where the backscattering induced by non-magnetic impurities was forbidden. Here we report the Landau quantization of the topological surface states in Bi_2Se_3 in magnetic field by using STM/STS. The direct observation of the discrete Landau levels (LLs) strongly supports the 2D nature of the topological states and gives direct proof of the nondegenerate structure of LLs in TI. We demonstrate the linear dispersion of the massless Dirac fermions by the square-root dependence of LLs on magnetic field. The formation of LLs implies the high mobility of the 2DES, which has been predicted to lead to topological magneto-electric effect of the TI.
The equivalence between neutral particles under rotation and charged particles in a magnetic field relates phenomena as diverse as spinning atomic nuclei, weather patterns, and the quantum Hall effect. In their quantum descriptions, translations along different directions do not commute, implying a Heisenberg uncertainty relation between spatial coordinates. Here, we exploit the ability to squeeze non-commuting variables to dynamically create a Bose-Einstein condensate occupying a single Landau gauge wavefunction in the lowest Landau level. We directly resolve the extent of the zero-point cyclotron orbits, and demonstrate geometric squeezing of the orbits guiding centers by more than ${7}~$dB below the standard quantum limit. The condensate attains an angular momentum of more than ${1000},{hbar}$ per particle, and an interatomic distance comparable to the size of the cyclotron orbits. This offers a new route towards strongly correlated fluids and bosonic quantum Hall states.
The half filled Landau level is expected to be approximately particle-hole symmetric, which requires an extension of the Halperin-Lee-Read (HLR) theory of the compressible state observed at this filling. Recent work indicates that, when particle-hole symmetry is preserved, the composite Fermions experience a quantized $pi$-Berry phase upon winding around the composite Fermi-surface, analogous to Dirac fermions at the surface of a 3D topological insulator. In contrast, the effective low energy theory of the composite fermion liquid originally proposed by HLR lacks particle-hole symmetry and has vanishing Berry phase. In this paper, we explain how thermoelectric transport measurements can be used to test the Dirac nature of the composite Fermions by quantitatively extracting this Berry phase. First we point out that longitudinal thermopower (Seebeck effect) is non-vanishing due to the unusual nature of particle hole symmetry in this context and is not sensitive to the Berry phase. In contrast, we find that off-diagonal thermopower (Nernst effect) is directly related to the topological structure of the composite Fermi surface, vanishing for zero Berry phase and taking its maximal value for $pi$ Berry phase. In contrast, in purely electrical transport signatures the Berry phase contributions appear as small corrections to a large background signal, making the Nernst effect a promising diagnostic of the Dirac nature of composite fermions.