Laughlin's function on a cylinder: plasma analogy and representation as a quantum polymer

Abstract

We investigate Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall effect wave function in the cylinder geometry of Laughlin's integer quantum Hall effect argument, at filling factor 1/3. We show that the plasma analogy leads to a periodic density, and that the wave function admits a representation as a ``quantum polymer'', reminiscent of the quantum dimer model by Rokhsar and Kivelson. We explain how the representation can be exploited to compute the normalization and one-particle density in the limit of infinitely many particles.