No Arabic abstract
The nature of the fractional quantum Hall state at quarter filling in a wide quantum well is still under debate. Both one-component non-Abelian and two-component Abelian orders have been proposed to describe the system. Interestingly, these candidates received support from different experiments under disparate conditions. In this article, we focus on non-Abelian orders from Cooper pairing between composite fermions and the Abelian Halperin-(5,5,3) order. We discuss and predict systematically different experimental signatures to identify them in future experiment. In particular, we address the Mach-Zehnder interferometry experiment and show that it can identify the recently proposed 22111 parton order.
The nature of the fractional quantum Hall effect at $ u=1/2$ observed in wide quantum wells almost three decades ago is still under debate. Previous studies have investigated it by the variational Monte Carlo method, which makes the assumption that the transverse wave function and the gap between the symmetric and antisymmetric subbands obtained in a local density approximation at zero magnetic field remain valid even at high perpendicular magnetic fields; this method also ignores the effect of Landau level mixing. We develop in this work a three-dimensional fixed phase Monte Carlo method, which gives, in a single framework, the total energies of various candidate states in a finite width quantum well, including Landau level mixing, directly in a large magnetic field. This method can be applied to one-component states, as well two-component states in the limit where the symmetric and antisymmetric bands are nearly degenerate. Our three-dimensional fixed-phase diffusion Monte Carlo calculations suggest that the observed 1/2 fractional quantum Hall state in wide quantum wells is likely to be the one-component Pfaffian state supporting non-Abelian excitations. We hope that this will motivate further experimental studies of this state.
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.
Utilizing an electronic Fabry-Perot interferometer in which Coulomb charging effects are suppressed, we report experimental observation of anyonic braiding statistics for the $ u=1/3$ fractional quantum Hall state. Strong Aharonov-Bohm interference of the $ u=1/3$ edge mode is punctuated by discrete phase slips consistent with an anyonic phase of $theta_{anyon}=frac{2pi}{3}$. Our results are consistent with a recent theory of a Fabry-Perot interferometer operated in a regime in which device charging energy is small compared to the energy of formation of charged quasiparticles. Close correspondence between device operation and theoretical predictions substantiates our claim of observation of anyonic braiding.
We present a pedagogical review of the physics of fractional Chern insulators with a particular focus on the connection to the fractional quantum Hall effect. While the latter conventionally arises in semiconductor heterostructures at low temperatures and in high magnetic fields, interacting Chern insulators at fractional band filling may host phases with the same topological properties, but stabilized at the lattice scale, potentially leading to high-temperature topological order. We discuss the construction of topological flat band models, provide a survey of numerical results, and establish the connection between the Chern band and the continuum Landau problem. We then briefly summarize various aspects of Chern band physics that have no natural continuum analogs, before turning to a discussion of possible experimental realizations. We close with a survey of future directions and open problems, as well as a discussion of extensions of these ideas to higher dimensions and to other topological phases.
We observe geometric resonance features of composite fermions on the flanks of the even denominator { u} = 1/2 fractional quantum Hall state in high-mobility two-dimensional electron and hole systems confined to wide GaAs quantum wells and subjected to a weak, strain-induced, unidirectional periodic potential modulation. The features provide a measure of how close to { u} = 1/2 the system stays single-component and supports a composite fermion Fermi sea before transitioning into a { u} = 1/2 fractional quantum Hall state, presumably the two-component {Psi}331 state.