Linear dependencies between composite fermion states

Abstract

The formalism of composite fermions (CFs) has been one of the most prominent and successful approaches to describing the fractional quantum Hall effect, in terms of trial many-body wave functions. Testing the accuracy of the latter typically involves rather heavy numerical comparison to exact diagonalization results. Thus, optimizing computational efficiency has been an important technical issue in this field. One generic (and not yet fully understood) property of the CF approach is that it tends to overcount the number of linearly independent candidate states for fixed sets of quantum numbers. Technically speaking, CF Slater determinants that are orthogonal before projection to the lowest Landau level, may lead to wave functions that are identical, or possess linear dependencies, after projection. This leads to unnecessary computations, and has been pointed out in the literature both for fermionic and bosonic systems. We here present a systematic approach that enables us to reveal all linear dependencies between bosonic compact states in the lowest CF ‘cyclotron energy’ sub-band, and almost all dependencies in higher sub-bands, at the level of the CF Slater determinants, i.e. before projection, which implies a major computational simplification. Our approach is introduced for so-called simple states of two-species rotating bosons, and then generalized to generic compact bosonic states, both one- and two-species. Some perspectives also apply to fermionic systems. The identities and linear dependencies we find, are analytically exact for ‘brute force’ projection in the disk geometry.