Instability of Laughlin FQH liquids into gapless power-law correlated states with continuous exponents in ideal Chern bands: rigorous results from plasma mapping

Abstract

We investigate the fate of Laughlin's wave-function in ideal Chern bands which can be mapped to generalized zero Landau levels in spatially dependent magnetic fields. By exploiting its exact mapping onto a classical Coulomb gas and leveraging previous results of one-component plasmas in nonuniform neutralizing backgrounds, we demonstrate that the ideal Laughlin wave-function undergoes a phase transition from its well-known fully gapped topologically ordered plasma state into a power-law correlated dielectric state even for the fixed filling of $1/3$, as the magnetic field becomes increasingly more inhomogeneous. This dielectric state is gapless even though it does not spontaneously break translational symmetry. Remarkably, for a fixed filling $\nu=1/m$, the exponent governing density correlations in this state changes continuously as a function of the degree of spatial inhomogeneity of the magnetic field, and can range from $4$ near a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition to the plasma state, up to $2 m$ in the limit of fields generated by point solenoids.