Many-Body Quantum Geometric Dipole

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general formulation for the quantum geometric dipole (QGD) in many-body electron systems, showing it is an intrinsic property of collective excitations independent of specific wavefunction representations.

Contribution

The authors develop a wavefunction-independent approach to define and compute the quantum geometric dipole for collective modes in quantum Hall systems.

Findings

QGD can be derived from the density matrix of excitations.

The formulation applies to both integer and fractional quantum Hall states.

QGD is an intrinsic property of collective excitations, not dependent on wavefunction approximations.

Abstract

Collective excitations of many-body electron systems can carry internal structure, tied to the quantum geometry of the Hilbert space in which they are embedded. This has been shown explicitly for particle-hole-like excitations, which carry a ``quantum geometric dipole'' (QGD) that is essentially an electric dipole moment associated with the state. We demonstrate in this work that this property can be formulated in a generic way, which does not require wavefunctions expressed in terms of single particle-hole states. Our formulation exploits the density matrix associated with a branch of excitations that evolves continuously with its momentum ${\bf K}$, from which one may extract single-particle states allowing a construction of the QGD. We demonstrate the formulation using the single-mode approximation for excited states of two quantum Hall systems: the first for an integrally filled Landau level, and the second for a fractional quantum Hall state at filling factor $\nu=1/m$, with $m$ an odd integer. In both cases we obtain the same result for the QGD, which can be attributed to the translational invariance assumed of the system. Our study demonstrates that the QGD is an intrinsic property of collective modes which is valid beyond approximations one might make for their wavefunctions.