Topology and fractional quantum Hall effect

• Published in: Nuclear physics. B 1995-06, Vol.443 (3), p.501-515
• Main Author: Varnhagen, Raimund
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0550-3213; 1873-1562
• DOI: 10.1016/0550-3213(95)00143-G

Starting from Laughlin-type wave functions with generalized periodic boundary conditions describing the degenerate ground state of a quantum Hall system we explicitly construct r-dimensional vector bundles. It turns out that the filling factor ν is given by the topological quantity c 1/ r where c 1 is the first Chem number of these vector bundles. In addition, we managed to proof that under physical natural assumptions the stable vector bundles correspond to the experimentally dominating series of measured fractional filling factors ν = n/(2 pn±1). Most remarkably, due to the very special form of the Laughlin wave functions the fluctuations of the curvature of these vector bundles converge to zero in the limit of infinitely many particles which shows a new mathematical property. Physically, this means that in this limit the Hall conductivity is independent of the boundary conditions which is very important for the observability of the effect. Finally, we discuss the relation of this result to a theorem of Donaldson.