706 Ch.

12 Quantum Hall Effect

possible. In the filled level Q l there is no escape from close approaches

which are governed by (zi - z j ) , a linearly vanishing factor. Now, our
@1/3 is doing no better because

vanishes also linearly. It is clear that keeping the same degree of the
polynom, a much better state could be obtained by requiring that the
close approach of i and j is governed by the factor (zi - which
vanishes much faster. Thus we are led to propose that the ground state
of the l/S-filled Landau level is the Laughlin state [236]

(12.104)

Since the largest power of z1 is 3(N - l), the filling is indeed v =

N / 3 ( N - 1) M 1/3 (for a large system).
Numerical evidence and analytic arguments show that Ql,3 is very
near to the true ground state. It is lucky that it is so because, had
one missed making such an insightful guess, it would have been very
difficult to find the ground state by a systematic approach. In terms
of the one-electron basis (12.61), the N-electron ground state can be
expressed as

(12.105)

and we are faced with a formidable eigenvalue problem of dimensionality

C$N, where the basis states are much more difficult to handle than
the usual plane wave (or Bloch) states. The only constraint is the
conservation of L” which requires C,”=,mj = 3(N - 1)N/2. In contrast
to (which is one of the N-electron basis states), the Laughlin state
is not a single-determinant state; in fact, it is a linear superposition of a
very large number of Slater determinants. This is usually the case with
optimally correlated many-electron states.
One way to grasp the uniqueness of the Laughlin state is this: all
allowed N-electron states are homogeneous polynoms of degree 3 ( N - l),
thus taken as functions of any of the coordinates z j , they have 3 ( N - 1)