Superconductivity and non-Fermi liquid metals in a charge-1/3 anyon fluid

Abstract

We revisit the charge-1/3 anyon fluid obtained by doping the $ν= 2/3$ Jain fractional Chern insulator (FCI). In the standard composite fermion description, the doped anyons fractionalize into three translation-related flavors of secondary composite fermions, whose gauge-mediated interactions drive a robust inter-flavor pairing instability. In our previous work, we analyzed a flavor-asymmetric paired state and obtained a charge-ordered Fermi liquid. Inspired by a recent paper, we consider an alternative flavor-symmetric paired state and show that it is an SC* state: a charge-$2e$ condensate that coexists with residual $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order. The weak and strong pairing regimes share the same intrinsic topological order but differ in chiral central charge, giving $c_- = 7/2$ and $c_- = 2$. We further show how other proposed effective field theories fit within the same composite fermion description, and argue that across the doping driven FCI-to-superconductor transition, localized anyons evolve into Bogoliubov quasiparticles rather than vortices. At low doping, we identify an approximate SU(3)-symmetric regime in which the system instead realizes a non-Fermi liquid $\mathbb{Z}_3$ Orthogonal Metal with three charge-1/3 fermion pockets and no sharp electron quasiparticle. Finally, we comment on the energetics of various possible ground states and discuss implications for experiments in moire materials.