Singular Behaviour of Electrons and of Composite Fermions in a Finite Effective Field

We propose a particle-hole symmetric theory of the Fermi-liquid ground state of a half-filled Landau level. This theory should be applicable for a Dirac fermion in the magnetic field at charge neutrality, as well as for the $\nu=\frac12$ quantum Hall ground state of nonrelativistic fermions in the limit of negligible inter-Landau-level mixing. We argue that when particle-hole symmetry is exact, the composite fermion is a massless Dirac fermion, characterized by a Berry phase ...

Electrons interact strongly with their environment. The result of these interactions is, most of the time, encoded in an effective mass. In non-relativistic systems, as in condensed matter, the electrons plus interactions form a quasiparticle with an effective mass. From the side of relativistic systems, the fermions also acquire an effective mass due to the interactions with the surrounding medium. We employ a non-perturbative method to calculate the effective mass of relati...

The concept of composite fermions, and the related Fermion-Chern-Simons theory, have been powerful tools for understanding quantum Hall systems with a partially full lowest Landau level. We shall review some of the successes of the Fermion-Chern-Simons theory, as well as some limitations and outstanding issues.

The failure of Landau-Fermi liquid theory is often considered a telltale sign of universal, scale-invariant behavior in the emergent field theory of interacting fermions. Nevertheless, there exist borderline cases where weak scale invariance coupled with particle-hole asymmetry can coexist with the Landau quasiparticle paradigm. In this letter, I show explicitly that a Landau-Fermi liquid can exist for weak power-law scaling of the retarded Green's function. Such an exotic va...

We show that at electronic filling factor $\nu=1/2$, the lowest Landau level constraint implies that at any temperature, and in the presence of {\it any} amount of particle-hole symmetric disorder, the {\it composite fermion} Hall conductivity is precisely $-e^2/2h$. (The electronic Hall conductivity is $e^2/2h$.) This is inconsistent with the response of a composite Fermi liquid in {\it zero} effective magnetic field. We also examine perturbatively the nature of the putative...

We propose that a composite fermion operator $f_{i\sigma}(2n_{i{\bar \sigma}}-1)$ could have coherent excitations, where $f_{i\sigma}$ is the fermion operator for interacting electrons and $n_{i{\bar \sigma}}$ is the number operator of the opposite spin. In the two-impurity Anderson model, it is found that the excitation of this composite fermion has a pseudogap in the Kondo regime, and has a finite spectral weight in the regime where the excitation of the regular fermion $f_...

We consider a system of interacting fermions in two dimensions beyond the second-order perturbation theory in the interaction. It is shown that the mass-shell singularities in the self-energy, arising already at the second order of the perturbation theory, manifest a non-perturbative effect: an interaction with the zero-sound mode. Resumming the perturbation theory for a weak, short-range interaction and accounting for a finite curvature of the fermion spectrum, we eliminate ...

We consider a local effective model for fermionic low lying excitations in a metal. Introducing a boson auxiliary field and taking into account that the most significant interactions between quasiparticles arise for those which are near a given point on the Fermi surface, we find that the effective boson-fermion interaction is singular for a spatial dimension d=2. We regularize the theory and apply the renormalization group method. As we vary the coupling constant as a functi...

It is shown that gauge theories with fermions are most naturally studied via a polar decomposition of the field variable. This is the fermionic analog of the preprint cond-mat/0210673. The hope is that these two put together will enable the treatment of neutral nonrelativisitc matter composed of electrons and nuclei in a nonperturbative manner with nuclei and electrons treated on an equal footing. We recast the electron-phonon (superconductivity) problem in the hydrodynamic l...

The density matrix of the 2D system of spinless electrons confined to the lowest Landau level is expressed using both basis of states parametrized by electron locations and basis of states parametrized by hole locations. In this representation, the electron-electron repulsion can be viewed as an electron-hole attraction. Electron-hole pairs stabilized by this attraction provide a new formulation for Composite Fermions which fully respects particle-hole symmetry. This represen...