Disorder-driven phase transitions in bosonic fractional quantum Hall liquids

TL;DR

This study explores how increasing disorder affects bosonic fractional quantum Hall liquids at specific filling factors, revealing phase transitions from topological states to trivial insulators through numerical analysis.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed numerical investigation of disorder-driven phase transitions in bosonic fractional quantum Hall states at filling factors 1/2 and 1.

Findings

Transition from Laughlin state to insulator at f=1/2

Transition from Moore-Read state to insulator at f=1

Consistency of critical disorder strengths across different measurements

Abstract

We investigate the disorder-driven phase transitions in bosonic fractional quantum Hall liquids at filling factors $f=1/2$ and $f=1$ in the lowest Landau level. We use the evolution of ground-state entanglement entropy, fidelity susceptibility, and Hall conductance with increasing disorder strength to identify the underlying phase transitions. The critical disorder strengths obtained from these different quantities are consistent with each other, validating the reliability of our numerical calculations based on exact diagonalization. At $f=1/2$, we observe a clear transition from the bosonic Laughlin state to a trivial insulating phase. At $f=1$, we identify a direct phase transition from the non-Abelian bosonic Moore-Read state to a trivial insulating phase, although some signs of a disorder-induced intermediate fractional quantum Hall phase were recently reported for the $f=5/2$ fermionic cousin.