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Stanford EE

Stability of fractional Chern insulators with a non-Landau level continuum limit

Summary
Bart Andrews (UC Berkeley)
McCullough 335
Apr
19
Date(s)
Content

The stability of fractional Chern insulators is widely believed to be predicted by the resemblance of their single-particle spectra to Landau levels. We investigate the scope of this "geometric stability hypothesis" by analyzing the stability of a set of fractional Chern insulators that explicitly do not have a Landau level continuum limit. By computing the many-body spectra of Laughlin states in a generalized Hofstadter model, we analyze the relationship between single-particle metrics, such as trace inequality saturation, and many-body metrics, such as the magnitude of the many-body and entanglement gaps. We show numerically that the geometric stability hypothesis holds for Chern bands that are not continuously connected to Landau levels, as well as conventional Chern bands, albeit often requiring larger system sizes to converge for these configurations.