Berry phase of the composite-fermion Fermi Sea: Effect of Landau-level mixing

TL;DR

This paper constructs accurate wave functions for the composite-fermion Fermi sea, investigates how Landau level mixing affects the Berry phase, and explores the connection to particle-hole symmetry in quantum Hall systems.

Contribution

It provides explicit wave functions for the composite-fermion Fermi sea and analyzes the impact of Landau level mixing on the Berry phase, linking it to particle-hole symmetry.

Findings

Berry phase varies rapidly with Landau level mixing.

Landau level mixing influences the Berry phase significantly.

Particle-hole symmetry breaking affects the Berry phase within the lowest Landau level.

Abstract

We construct explicit lowest-Landau-level wave functions for the composite-fermion Fermi sea and its low energy excitations following a recently developed approach [Pu, Wu and Jain, Phys. Rev. B 96, 195302 (2018)] and demonstrate them to be very accurate representations of the Coulomb eigenstates. We further ask how the Berry phase associated with a closed loop around the Fermi circle, predicted to be $\pi$ in a Dirac composite fermion theory satisfying particle-hole symmetry [D. T. Son, Phys. Rev. X 5, 031027 (2015)], is affected by Landau level mixing. For this purpose, we consider a simple model wherein we determine the variational ground state as a function of Landau level mixing within the space spanned by two basis functions: the lowest-Landau-level projected and the unprojected composite-fermion Fermi sea wave functions. We evaluate Berry phase for a path around the Fermi circle within this model following a recent prescription, and find that it rotates rapidly as a function of Landau level mixing. We also consider the effect of a particle-hole symmetry breaking three-body interaction on the Berry phase while confining the Hilbert space to the lowest Landau level. Our study deepens the connection between the $\pi$ Berry phase and the exact particle-hole symmetry in the lowest Landau level.