Holomorphicity, vortex attachment, gauge invariance and the fractional quantum Hall effect

Abstract

A gauge invariant reformulation of nonrelativistic fermions in background magnetic fields is used to obtain the Laughlin and Jain wave functions as exact results in mean field theory (MFT). The gauge invariant framework trades the U(1) gauge symmetry for an emergent holomorphic symmetry and fluxes for vortices. The novel holomorphic invariance is used to develop an analytical method for attaching vortices to particles. Vortex attachment methods introduced in this paper are subsequently employed to construct the Read operator within a second quantized framework and obtain the Laughlin and Jain wave functions as exact results entirely within a mean-field approximation. The gauge invariant framework and vortex attachment techniques are generalized to the case of spherical geometry and spherical counterparts of Laughlin and Jain wave functions are also obtained exactly within MFT.