Le contenu de cette page n’est pas disponible en français. Veuillez nous en excuser.
 

Phase transition of fractional Chern insulators: QED3 and beyond



Playing this video requires the latest flash player from Adobe.

Download link (right click and 'save-as') for playing in VLC or other compatible player.


Recording Details

Speaker(s): 
Scientific Areas: 
PIRSA Number: 
19040110

Abstract

Recent experiments in graphene heterostructures have observed Chern insulators - integer and fractional Quantum Hall states made possible by a periodic substrate potential. Here we study theoretically that the competition between different Chern insulators, which can be tuned by the amplitude of the periodic potential, leads to a new family of quantum critical points described by QED3-Chern-Simons theory. At these critical points, Nf flavors of Dirac fermions interact through an emergent U(1) gauge theory at Chern-Simons level K, and remarkably, the entire family (with any Nf or K) can be realized at special values of the external magnetic field. I will talk about the physical properties and microscopic realization of those critical points. We propose experiments on Chern insulators that could resolve open questions in the study of 2+1 dimensional conformal field theories and test recent duality inspired conjectures.