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

ORAL

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 $2\pi$ flux quanta, $s$, that must be inserted to obtain a topologically trivial excitation. As we discuss, $s$ 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.

Presenters

  • Hossein Dehghani

    University of Maryland, College Park, Joint Quantum Institute

Authors

  • Hossein Dehghani

    University of Maryland, College Park, Joint Quantum Institute

  • ZePei Cian

    University of Maryland, College Park

  • Mohammad Hafezi

    University of Maryland, College Park, Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland

  • Maissam Barkeshli

    Condensed Matter Theory Center and Joint Quantum Institute, Department of Physics, University of Maryland, University of Maryland, College Park