2D or not 2D: a "holographic dictionary" for Lowest Landau Levels

TL;DR

This paper develops a 1D quantum mechanical framework to describe the physics of lowest Landau levels in 2D fermions under magnetic fields, revealing a novel density bound and unique entanglement entropy behavior.

Contribution

It constructs an exact 1D-2D correspondence for LLL physics, including a phase space density bound and a distinctive entanglement entropy profile due to noncommutativity.

Findings

Wigner distribution bounds fermion density in LLL.

Entanglement entropy lacks logarithmic growth despite Fermi surface.

Post-quench dynamics simplifies to 1D phase space hydrodynamics.

Abstract

We consider 2D fermions on a plane with a perpendicular magnetic field, described by Landau levels. It is wellknown that, semiclassically, restriction to the lowest Landau levels (LLL) implies two constraints on a 4D phase space, that transforms the 2D coordinate space (x,y) into a 2D phase space, thanks to the non-zero Dirac bracket between x and y. A naive application of Dirac's prescription of quantizing LLL in terms of L2 functions of x (or of y) fails because the wavefunctions are functions of x and y. We are able, however, to construct a 1D QM, sitting differently inside the 2D QM, which describes the LLL physics. The construction includes an exact 1D-2D correspondence between the fermion density \rho(x,y) and the Wigner distribution of the 1D QM. In a suitable large N limit, (a) the Wigner distribution is upper bounded by 1, since a phase space cell can have at most one fermion (Pauli exclusion principle) and (b) the 1D-2D correspondence becomes an identity transformation. (a) and (b) imply an upper bound for the fermion density \rho(x,y). We also explore the entanglement entropy (EE) of subregions of the 2D noncommutative space. It behaves differently from conventional 2D systems as well as conventional 1D systems, falling somewhere between the two. The main new feature of the EE, directly attributable to the noncommutative space, is the absence of a logarithmic dependence on the size of the entangling region, even though there is a Fermi surface. In this paper, instead of working directly with the Landau problem, we consider a more general problem, of 2D fermions in a rotating harmonic trap, which reduces to the Landau problem in a special limit. Among other consequences of the emergent 1D physics, we find that post-quench dynamics of the (generalized) LLL system is computed more simply in 1D terms, which is described by well-developed methods of 2D phase space hydrodynamics.