Quantum melting a Wigner crystal into Hall liquids

ORAL

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that, counterintuitively, applying a magnetic field to a Wigner crystal can induce quantum Hall effects. In this work, using variational Monte Carlo, we show that magnetic fields can melt zero-field Wigner crystals into integer quantum Hall liquids. This melting originates from quantum oscillations in the liquid’s ground state energy, which develops downward cusps at integer filling factors due to incompressibility. Our calculations establish a range of densities in which this quantum melting transition occurs.

Reference: arXiv:2508.21000

*The authors acknowledge the MIT Super- Cloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center for providing computing resources that have contributed to the research results reported in this paper. This work was supported by the U.S. Army DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies under Cooperative Agreement number W911NF-23-2-0121. LF was supported by a Simons In- vestigator Award from the Simons Foundation.

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Presenters

  • Aidan Patrick Reddy

    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Authors

  • Aidan Patrick Reddy

    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Liang Fu

    • Massachusetts Institute of Technology