Laughlin State on Stretched and Squeezed Cylinders and Edge Excitations in Quantum Hall Effect

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Laughlin wave function on a cylinder, exploring phase transitions, edge excitations, and finite-size effects, providing insights into quantum Hall states and their edge behaviors.

Contribution

It offers new exact properties of the Laughlin wave function, studies edge excitations with numerical and analytical methods, and compares finite-size results with theoretical models.

Findings

Transition from incompressible fluid to charge density wave as cylinder radius decreases

Edge fluctuation exponents match recent theoretical predictions

Occupation numbers of edge states agree with Calogero-Sutherland model for various system sizes

Abstract

We study the Laughlin wave function on the cylinder. We find it only describes an incompressible fluid when the two lengths of the cylinder are comparable. As the radius is made smaller at fixed area, we observe a continuous transition to the charge density wave Tao-Thouless state. We also present some exact properties of the wave function in its polynomial form. We then study the edge excitations of the quantum Hall incompressible fluid modeled by the Laughlin wave function. The exponent describing the fluctuation of the edge predicted by recent theories is shown to be identical with numerical calculations. In particular, for $\nu=1/3$, we obtain the occupation amplitudes of edge state $n(k)$ for 4-10 electron size systems. When plotted as a function of the scaled wave vector they become essentially free of finite-size effects. The resulting curve obtains a very good agreement with the appropriate infinite-size Calogero-Sutherland model occupation numbers. Finally, we numerically obtain $n(k)$ of the edge excitations for some pairing states which may be relevant to the $\nu=5/2$ incompressible Hall state.