Large-scale simulations of particle-hole-symmetric Pfaffian trial wavefunctions

Abstract

We introduce a family of paired-composite-fermion trial wave functions for any odd Cooper-pair angular momentum. These wave functions are parameter-free and can be efficiently projected into the lowest Landau level. We use large-scale Monte Carlo simulations to study three cases: Firstly, the Moore-Read phase, which serves us as a benchmark. Secondly, we explore the pairing associated with the anti-Pfaffian and the particle-hole-symmetric Pfaffian. Specifically, we assess whether their trial states feature exponentially decaying correlations and thus represent gapped phases of matter. For Moore-Read and anti-Pfaffian we find decay lengths of ${\xi }_{\text{Moore-Read}}=1.30(5)$ and ${\xi }_{\text{anti-Pfaffian}}=1.38(14)$, in units of the magnetic length. By contrast, for the case of PH-Pfaffian, we find no evidence of a finite length scale for up to $56$ particles.

13 pages, 9 figures, published version