# Masses of composite fermions carrying two and four flux quanta: Differences and similarities

## Abstract

This study provides a theoretical rationalization for the intriguing experimental observation regarding the equality of the “normalized” masses of composite fermions carrying two and four flux quanta, and also demonstrates that the mass of the latter type of composite fermion has a substantial filling factor dependence in the filling factor range $`4/17>\nu >1/5`$, in agreement with experiment, originating from the relatively strong inter-composite fermion interactions here.

This work has been motivated by certain perplexing experimental results obtained recently by Yeh et al.  and Pan et al.  regarding the composite fermion mass. Composite fermions are formed when electrons confined to two dimensions are exposed to a strong magnetic field, since they best screen the repulsive Coulomb interaction by effectively absorbing an even number of magnetic flux quanta each to turn into composite fermions . Numerous properties of composite fermions have been investigated over the past decade; in particular, their Fermi sea, Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations, cyclotron orbits and quantized Landau levels have been observed, and their charge, spin, statistics, mass, g factor and thermopower have been measured . The subject of this article is the masses of composite fermions carrying two and four flux quanta, denoted by <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs, respectively. The authors of Refs.  and  define a dimensionless “normalized” mass $`m_{nor}^{}=m^{}/(m_e\sqrt{B[T]})`$ where $`m^{}`$ is the composite fermion (CF) mass, $`m_e`$ is the electron mass in vacuum and $`B[T]`$ is the magnetic field quoted in Tesla. (The electron mass in vacuum is chosen only as a convenient reference; the CF mass is not related to it in any way.) One unexpected outcome of the experiments was that the mass of composite fermion carrying four flux quanta at $`\nu =n/(4n+1)`$ behaves qualitatively differently than the mass of composite fermion carrying two flux quanta at $`\nu =n/(2n+1)`$. Specifically, whereas for the latter the mass is approximately constant sufficiently far from the composite fermion Fermi sea at $`\nu =1/2`$, for the former the mass increases substantially as the filling factor decreases from $`\nu =4/17`$ to $`\nu =1/5`$. This behavior was attributed to the presence of the localized Wigner crystal state at still smaller filling factors. However, one may ask: Is this effect intrinsic or driven by disorder? If intrinsic, can our present theoretical understanding account for it? What is its physical origin? Another remarkable finding was that the values of $`m_{nor}^{}`$’s for composite fermions carrying two and four flux quanta are quite close in regions where they do not have strong filling factor dependence. This was entirely unforeseen and rather difficult to justify in general terms; in fact, for a strictly two dimensional system, the $`m_{nor}^{}`$ at $`\nu =1/3`$ and $`\nu =1/5`$ can be determined from the known gaps to differ by a factor of 2.5. These experimental results thus pose well defined questions for the theory to explain. It is clear that the explanation will not involve any universal symmetry principles, but rather a detailed, quantitative understanding of the physics.

In the limit of very large magnetic fields, it is a good approximation (made throughout this work) to restrict the Hilbert space of states to the lowest Landau level of electrons. The kinetic energy degree of freedom of the electron is then quenched, and the defining problem contains no mass parameter. The physical picture that we wish to present here is as follows. When electrons transform into composite fermions, the interaction energy of electrons is converted into two parts: the kinetic energy of composite fermions, which defines a “bare” mass for the composite fermion, and a residual interaction between composite fermions. The experimentally measured mass is of course the fully renormalized CF mass. When the inter-CF interaction is weak, the measured mass is roughly equal to the bare mass, and therefore approximately constant as a function of the filling factor. However, when the inter-CF interaction is non-negligible, the measured mass can be substantially different from the bare mass and also have significant filling factor dependence. Both the bare mass and its renormalization are formally of the same order, originating from the same underlying electron-electron interaction, and it is not obvious a priori how to separate them theoretically. Nonetheless, we will see that, on the basis of general considerations, it is possible to deduce theoretically a bare mass for composite fermion. We find that (i) the regions where the composite fermion mass has significant filling factor dependence coincide with the regions where the residual interactions are strong; and (ii) the bare masses of composite fermions carrying two and four flux quanta are approximately equal.

The mass of composite fermions carrying $`2p`$ flux qauanta (<sup>2p</sup>CFs) at $`\nu =n/(2pn+1)`$ will be defined by equating the activation energy $`\mathrm{\Delta }`$ measured in transport experiments to an effective cyclotron energy of the composite fermion : $`\mathrm{\Delta }[n/(2pn+1)]=\mathrm{}eB^{}/m^{}c=\mathrm{}^2/[(2pn+1)m^{}l_0^2]`$ where $`l_0=\sqrt{\mathrm{}c/eB}`$ is the magnetic length, and $`B^{}`$ is the effective magnetic field for composite fermion, given by $`B^{}=B/(2pn+1)`$ at $`\nu =n/(2pn+1)`$. On the other hand, since the gaps are determined entirely by the Coulomb interaction, the only energy in the lowest Landau level constrained problem, they must be proportional to $`e^2/ϵl_0`$, $`ϵ`$ being the dielectric constant of the background material. Defining $`\mathrm{\Delta }=\delta (e^2/ϵl_0),`$ one obtains $`m^{}=\mathrm{}^2ϵ/[(2pn+1)\delta e^2l_0].`$ For GaAs, with $`ϵ=12.8`$ and band mass $`=0.07m_e`$, the dimensionless mass is related to $`\delta `$ as $`m_{nor}^{}=0.0264/[(2pn+1)\delta ].`$

Experimentally, rather than using the gaps directly, the mass of composite fermion is often determined from an analysis of the temperature dependence of the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations of composite fermions, or from the slope of the activation gaps plotted as a function of the effective magnetic field, with the expectation that the mass thus obtained is less affected by the disorder, and is consequently closer to the intrinsic mass than the mass obtained directly from the experimental activation gaps. Incidentally, a different mass of composite fermion is the “polarization mass,”  determined from the values of the Zeeman energy at which transitions between ground states of different polarizations take place; its normalized value for <sup>2</sup>CFs was estimated theoretically  to be $`0.6`$, in good agreement with subsequent experiments .

To investigate the findings of Refs.  and , we have computed the gaps for fractional quantum Hall states at $`\nu =n/(4n+1)`$ in a Monte Carlo scheme using the Jain wave functions, and employing the lowest-Landau-level projection technique described in Ref. . In each case, the thermodynamic limit for the gap is obtained by a consideration of systems with up to 100 particles. Up to 10 million Monte Carlo steps are performed for each energy (20 million for relatively large systems, containing 70-100 particles); the error in the thermodynamic gap is a combination of the uncertainty in the gaps of finite systems and the uncertainty in their extrapolation to the thermodynamic limit. The wave function in the transverse direction, needed for the determination of the effective two-dimensional inter-electron interaction, is evaluated as a function of the two-dimensional density ($`\rho `$) in a self-consistent local density approximation (LDA), for a heterojunction sample. $`V_{eff}(r)`$ differs from the Coulomb interaction at short distances, causing a reduction in the value of the gap. Disorder is known to further reduce the gap, but in the absence of a reliable theoretical approach to deal with it, it has been set to zero in the following. Landau level (LL) mixing is also neglected, but it is known to make only a slight correction to the value of the gap after the non-zero thickness is incorporated . There is no adjustable parameter in the calculations. For further details, the reader is referred to Ref.  and the references therein.

The gap to charged excitations was calculated for $`\nu =1/5`$, $`2/9`$, $`3/13`$, and $`4/17`$ as a function of the density. Fig. (1) shows the mass deduced from the gap, in units of $`m_e\sqrt{B[T]}`$, and Fig. (2) shows the $`n`$ dependence of the mass for certain typical densities. The corresponding results for <sup>2</sup>CFs are also shown in these figures for comparison . In the following, we discuss the conclusions that emerge from these results.

The reader may note that for a given filling factor, $`m_{nor}^{}`$ is only very weakly dependent on density, as also found experimentally . For example, while the density changes by a factor of 20 from $`0.5\times 10^{11}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup> to $`1.0\times 10^{12}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup>, $`m_{nor}^{}`$ changes only by $``$ 30% or less; e.g., for <sup>2</sup>CFs, it goes from approximately 0.12 to 0.13-0.16 for the filling factors shown. At first sight, this may seem precisely as expected, since for strictly zero thickness, for which the interparticle interaction is proportional to $`e^2/l_0\sqrt{B}`$, the factor $`\sqrt{B}`$ accounts for the entire density dependence of the mass (remember, the density and $`B`$ are related for a given filling factor). However, in reality, there is another length scale controlled by the density, namely the width of the wave function in the direction perpendicular to the plane, which also affects the interaction between electrons and gives a density dependence to $`m_{nor}^{}`$. To estimate the size of the correction, consider the widely used model potential $`V_{ZDS}(r)=(e^2/ϵ)(\lambda ^2+r^2)^{1/2}`$. The relevant quantity is the dimensionless ‘thickness’ parameter $`\lambda /l_0`$, which changes by a factor of $``$ 4.5 over the density range stated above, assuming a constant $`\lambda `$; for a change of $`\lambda /l_0`$ from 1.0 to 4.5, the results in Ref.  imply a change of $`m_{nor}^{}`$ by a factor of 4 to 6 at filling factors $`\nu =1/3`$, $`2/5`$ and $`3/7`$. This underlines the importance of the use of a realistic interaction, which leads to a much smaller variation of the normalized mass as a function of the density. Some insight into the issue of the density dependence can be gained from the Fang-Howard variational form for the transverse wave function , $`\xi _{FH}z\mathrm{exp}[bz/2]`$, where $`z`$ is the distance in the direction perpendicular to the plane and $`b\rho ^{1/3}`$, neglecting the depletion charge density . The maximum of the wave function is obtained at $`w=2/b`$, which is a measure of the effective width in the transverse direction. Noting that $`l_0\rho ^{1/2}`$ for a fixed filling factor, we obtain for the dimensionless width, $`w/l_0\rho ^{1/6}`$; the smallness of the exponent gives an indication of why the density dependence of the mass is so weak. Coming back to $`V_{ZDS}(r)`$, the above discussion implies that the relationship between $`\lambda `$ and the “thickness” (or the density) is not straightforward for the heterojunction geometry.

A clear qualitative difference between the behaviors of the masses of <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs as a function of $`n`$, the number of filled CF-LLs, is manifest in Fig. (2), for the pure two-dimensional case as well as after including the finite thickness correction. The mass is seen to increase significantly in going from $`\nu =4/17`$ to $`\nu =2/9`$, in agreement with the experiment . What is the physical origin of this behavior? By definition, for strictly non-interacting composite fermions the $`m_{nor}^{}`$ is a constant equal to the bare $`m_{nor}^{}`$, implying that any variation in the mass originates from a renormalization of the bare mass by the residual interaction between composite fermions. One therefore expects to see a filling factor dependence of the CF mass only in regions where the inter-CF interaction is strong compared to the “bare” gap. One such region is in the vicinity of the composite fermion Fermi sea where the bare gap becomes rather small. The interaction between composite fermions also becomes increasingly significant at small filling factors. A recent work  has found that in the filling factor range $`1/4>\nu >1/5`$ interaction between composite fermions is strong, in fact comparable to the effective CF Fermi energy, causing a spontaneous magnetization for <sup>4</sup>CFs even when the Zeeman energy is negligible. We believe that the same interaction between composite fermions causes the anomalous filling factor dependence of $`m_{nor}^{}`$ in this region. This is indeed closely related to the physics attributed to this effect in Ref. , since the inter-CF interactions are also responsible for an instability into the Wigner crystal state at still lower filling factors . Further, it is intuitively quite plausible that the mass is enhanced, rather than diminished, by the inter-CF interaction, because it will likely broaden the CF-LLs and, leading to a gap reduction or a mass increment.

The Fig. (2) also gives a clue to how one may understand theoretically the experimentally discovered equality of the masses of <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs. In the two-dimensional limit, the mass ratios $`m_{nor}^{}[\nu =n/(4n+1)]/m_{nor}^{}[\nu =n/(2n+1)]`$ is $``$ 2.5, 2.0, 1.7, and 1.4 for $`n=1`$, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. One of the original motivations behind our calculations was to investigate if the finite thickness correction might bring the ratios closer to unity, but they turn out to be rather insensitive to the density. These ratios, however, are not really inconsistent with experiment, since the mass equality pertains to the masses outside the interaction dominated regions, i.e., to the bare masses, which raises the question of how the bare masses can be deduced from the fully renormalized masses obtained in our calculations. For <sup>2</sup>CFs, it is natural to fix the bare mass by extrapolating the mass to $`n\mathrm{}`$ in Fig. (2) while leaving out the masses at $`\nu =5/11`$ and $`\nu =4/9`$, where the interaction effects become important. For <sup>4</sup>CFs, it would be appropriate to determine masses from the states $`\nu =n/(4n1)`$, following Refs.  and , where the filling factor dependence is small. However, these states are accessed from $`n`$ filled Landau levels by reverse flux attachment , the technical complications arising from which preclude us from carrying out calculations directly at these filling factors. We instead propose to determine the bare mass of <sup>4</sup>CFs by performing an extrapolation of the masses at $`\nu =2/9`$, $`\nu =3/13`$ and $`\nu =4/17`$ to $`\nu =1/4`$ in Fig. (2) . Quite remarkably, this procedure produces very similar values of $`m_{nor}^{}`$’s for <sup>4</sup>CFs and <sup>2</sup>CFs, e.g., $`m_{nor}^{}0.120.13`$ at $`\rho =0.5\times 10^{11}`$ cm<sup>-2</sup>. Furthermore, the bare $`m_{nor}^{}`$ of <sup>4</sup>CFs is approximately one half of the $`m_{nor}^{}`$ at $`\nu =1/5`$ in our calculations. In experiments, the interpretation of the mass at $`\nu =1/5`$ is complicated by the proximity to strong localization; the mass at $`\nu =4/5`$, which is $`\nu =1/5`$ of holes, may provide a more meaningful comparison to theory. The mass at $`\nu =4/5`$ was found to be $`m_{nor}^{}=0.530.58`$, also approximately twice the value of the experimental bare mass $`m_{nor}^{}=0.250.27`$. This general consistency with experiment provides an a posteriori justification for our method of obtaining the bare mass of <sup>4</sup>CFs.

As mentioned earlier, there is no fundamental principle that forces the equality of the bare masses … it just turns out to be so for the real situation. It is in fact straightforward to construct artificial potentials for which the bare masses are not equal. For example, consider a model in which only two pseudpotentials, $`V_1`$ and $`V_3`$ are non-zero, with $`V_1>>V_3.`$ For <sup>2</sup>CFs the gaps are determined by the full interaction, i.e., effectively by $`V_1`$. For <sup>4</sup>CFs, a good approximation to the various eigenstates (exact in the limit $`V_3/V_10`$) is obtained by multiplying the corresponding <sup>2</sup>CF eigenstates by $`_{j<k}(z_jz_k)^2`$, where $`z_j=x_j+iy_j`$ is the coordinate of the $`j`$th electron. This eliminates states containing particles with relative angular momentum equal to unity, making eigenenergies independent of $`V_1`$. Thus, in this model the mass of <sup>2</sup>CFs is controlled by $`V_1`$ whereas that of <sup>4</sup>CFs by $`V_3`$, and consequently the two can be tuned independently of one another.

While we have obtained the qualitative behavior seen in experiment, the explanation is incomplete until the value of the experimental mass itself can be accounted for theoretically. At the moment, the theoretical mass differs from the experimental one by roughly a factor of two. A proper understanding of the discrepancy would ultimately require a quantitative theory of Shubnikov de Haas (SdH) oscillations of the composite fermions, and of how the disorder affects the mass. The deviation between the theoretical and experimental masses is at least consistent with what one might expect from disorder. First, the experimental bare mass for <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs ($`m_{nor}^{}0.250.27`$) is bigger than the theoretical one ($`m_{nor}^{}0.120.13`$). Second, the values of the experimental and theoretical bare masses differ by roughly the same amount (a factor of two) for both <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs.

In conclusion, the theory is able to reproduce certain qualitative features of the dependence of the composite fermion mass on various parameters. The following overall picture has emerged: The bare masses of <sup>2</sup>CFs and <sup>4</sup>CFs are quite close, but are significantly renormalized in regions where the inter-CF interactions are non-negligible, specifically, close to the Fermi sea as well as for $`\nu <1/4`$. We thank V. Scarola, R. Shankar, and H. Stormer for useful discussions and comments, and gratefully acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation under grant no. DMR-9615005, and by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (Origin 2000), as well as the Numerically Intensive Computing Group at the Penn State University-CAC.