English

Extraction of many-body Chern number from a single wave function

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2021-02-10 v2 High Energy Physics - Theory Mathematical Physics math.MP Quantum Physics

Abstract

The quantized Hall conductivity of integer and fractional quantum Hall (IQH and FQH) states is directly related to a topological invariant, the many-body Chern number. The conventional calculation of this invariant in interacting systems requires a family of many-body wave functions parameterized by twist angles in order to calculate the Berry curvature. In this paper, we demonstrate how to extract the Chern number given a single many-body wave function, without knowledge of the Hamiltonian. For FQH states, our method requires one additional integer invariant as input: the number of 2π2\pi flux quanta, ss, that must be inserted to obtain a topologically trivial excitation. As we discuss, ss can be obtained in principle from the degenerate set of ground state wave functions on the torus, without knowledge of the Hamiltonian. We perform extensive numerical simulations involving IQH and FQH states to validate these methods.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.13677,
  title  = {Extraction of many-body Chern number from a single wave function},
  author = {Hossein Dehghani and Ze-Pei Cian and Mohammad Hafezi and Maissam Barkeshli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13677},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

24 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:52:06.909Z