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

ORAL

Abstract

Utilizing large-scale Monte-Carlo simulations, we investigate an unconventional two-component classical plasma in two dimensions that interacts with two different Coulomb interactions. This plasma controls the behavior of the norms and overlaps of the quantum-mechanical wavefunctions of Ising-type quantum Hall states. It also relates to a model for a rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate with an Andreev-Bashkin drag interaction. 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 and that 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.

*Supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, NSF grants No. DMR-0955902, No. PHY-0904017, DARPA QuEST program, NRC Grant No. 205591/V30 (FRINAT).

Authors

  • Egil V. Herland

    • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Egor Babaev

    • UMass Amherst and KTH Stockholm
  • Parsa Bonderson

    • Microsoft Research, Station Q
  • Victor Gurarie

    • University of Colorado, Boulder
  • Chetan Nayak

    • Microsoft Research, Station Q and University of California, Santa Barbara
  • Asle Sudbo

    • Norwegian University of Science and Technology