English

Screening properties and phase transitions in unconventional plasmas for Ising-type quantum Hall states

Statistical Mechanics 2012-03-08 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Utilizing large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations, we investigate an unconventional two-component classical plasma in two dimensions which controls the behavior of the norms and overlaps of the quantum-mechanical wavefunctions of Ising-type quantum Hall states. The plasma differs fundamentally from that which is associated with the two-dimensional XY model and Abelian fractional quantum Hall states. We find that this unconventional plasma undergoes a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transition from an insulator to a metal. The parameter values corresponding to Ising-type quantum Hall states lie on the metallic side of this transition. This result verifies the required properties of the unconventional plasma used to demonstrate that Ising-type quantum Hall states possess quasiparticles with non-Abelian braiding statistics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1111.0135,
  title  = {Screening properties and phase transitions in unconventional plasmas for Ising-type quantum Hall states},
  author = {Egil Herland and Egor Babaev and Parsa Bonderson and Victor Gurarie and Chetan Nayak and Asle Sudbø},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1111.0135},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

16 pages, 14 figures. Submitted to Physical Review B