A Hafnian PH-Pfaffian State for 5/2 Quantum Hall Effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state for the 5/2 quantum Hall effect, providing numerical support and showing its consistency with experimental thermal Hall conductance measurements.

Contribution

It proposes a new wavefunction, the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state, and demonstrates its numerical viability and mathematical equivalence to a compressed PH-Pfaffian state.

Findings

Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state has higher overlap with exact ground states under certain conditions.

The state shares the same central charge as the PH-Pfaffian, aligning with thermal conductance data.

Numerical results on modified wavefunctions suggest new insights into paired composite fermions.

Abstract

The PH-Pfaffian state having 1/2 central charge is consistent with the thermal Hall conductance measurement of 5/2 fractional quantum Hall system, but lacks support from the existing numerical results. In this paper we propose a new state described by a wavefunction obtained by multiplying a Hafnian factor to a PH-Pfaffian wavefunction. We call this new state the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state. In spherical geometry, the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state has the same magnetic flux number as the Pfaffian state, allowing a direct numerical comparison between the two states. Results of exact diagonalization of finite systems in the second Landau level show that the overlap of the exact ground state with the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state exceeds that with the Pfaffian state when the short range component of the Coulomb interaction increases to a certain level, lending a numerical support to the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state. We further show the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state is mathematically identical to the newly proposed compressed PH-Pfaffian state [arxiv: 2001.01915 (2020)] formed by "compressing" the PH-Pfaffian state with two flux quanta removed to create two abelian Laughlin type quasiparticles of the maximum avoidance from one another. As the result we argue that the Hafnian PH-Pfaffian state has the same central charge as the PH-Pfaffian state, and is therefore consistent with the thermal Hall conductance measurement. Finally we present numerical results on two new wavefunctions formed by increasing the relative angular momentum by two for each of the paired composite fermions of the PH-Pfaffian state.