Fractional Quantum Hall states in the vicinity of Mott plateaus

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that bosons in a rotating optical lattice can form fractional quantum Hall states under certain conditions, with potential experimental signatures, using variational Monte Carlo and comparison to exact calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a variational approach to identify fractional quantum Hall states in bosonic optical lattices near Mott insulators, highlighting their properties and experimental signatures.

Findings

Fractional quantum Hall states are energetically favorable under specific conditions.

High overlaps indicate strong correlation with exact ground states.

Distinct experimental signatures can identify these states.

Abstract

We perform variational Monte-Carlo calculations to show that bosons in a rotating optical lattice will form analogs of fractional quantum Hall states when the tunneling is sufficiently weak compared to the interactions and the deviation of density from an integer is commensurate with the effective magnetic field. We compare the energies of superfluid and correlated states to one-another and to the energies found in full configuration-interaction calculations on small systems. We look at overlaps between our variational states and the exact ground-state, characterizing the ways in which fractional quantum Hall effect correlations manifest themselves near the Mott insulating state. We explore the experimental signatures of these states.