Reordering Fractional Chern Insulators into Stripes of Fractional Charges with Long-Range Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how long-range interactions influence fractional Chern insulators, revealing a transition from a uniform liquid to a stripe-like charge density wave of fractional charges, highlighting FCIs as a robust platform for quasiparticle studies.

Contribution

It demonstrates the impact of long-range interactions on FCIs, showing a transition to stripe phases, which was not previously established.

Findings

Uniform FCI liquid remains stable under some long-range interactions.

Increased screening length induces stripe phases of fractional charges.

FCIs are confirmed as a robust platform for quasiparticle collective states.

Abstract

Long-range interactions drive some of the rich phenomenology of quasiparticle collective states in the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) regime. We test for analogues in models of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) derived from a screened Coulomb interaction. We find that the uniform FCI liquid is surprisingly robust to long-range interactions but gives way to a unidirectional charge density wave (CDW) of fractionally charged quasiparticles with increased screening length. Our results show that FCIs offer a robust and important platform for studying quasiparticles collective states.