12.

4 fractional Quantum Hall Effect 715

is to project C 2 Q 2 onto the lowest Landau level, and strictly speaking,

this step should always be included. However, we might fear that if this
brings a major restructuring of the state, then the carefully designed
correlations become lost. Fortunately, this is not the case: Q2/5 as
written down in (12.114) is almost completely within the lowest Landau
level! An elementary argument as to how this can come about, may be
the following: let us assume that in the expansion of Q2/5, zj appears in
the form zj*zj”. This reminds us of the mth orbital of the n = 1 Landau
level, but it is not quite that: combining (12.61) and (12.65)) we find

Since after “blowing up” the system with &, the typical power is very
large (m - N),the relevant one-electron states are almost entirely
within the n = 0 level. A numerical study of the many-electron states
of small systems [405] corroborates this conclusion.
It may look disquieting to refer to higher Landau levels if we want
to construct a state within the lowest level, but it would be unjustified
to think so. After all, also a fully Gutzwiller-projected state is quite
unlike the parent Fermi sea. It is after the application of the correlators
that the state has to be physically acceptable, not before.
It is worth recalling that Landau levels are indeed mixed in the phys-
ically relevant range of parameters. However, this is not the motivation
for introducing the Jain states, and conversely, the small admixture
from higher levels implied by the construction of these trial states is not
meant to describe the true level mixing.

12.5 Discussion and Outlook

In the previous chapters, we acquired a certain feeling about the likely
effects of electron-electron interactions. We understood that if the ratio
(3tin+,)/(3.1iin) (where (Xiin) is a suitable measure of the one-electron
energy) exceeds a threshold of 0(1), and if the band filling is right
(what this means, depends on the range and form of the interaction),
then the system settles into a strongly correlated localized state such
as a Mott insulator or a Wigner crystal. At the first sight, the problem