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Laughlin wavefunction


In condensed matter physics, the Laughlin wavefunction is an ansatz, proposed by Robert Laughlin for the ground state of a two-dimensional electron gas placed in a uniform background magnetic field in the presence of a uniform jellium background when the filling factor (Quantum Hall effect) of the lowest Landau level is where is an odd positive integer. It was constructed to explain the observation of the fractional quantum Hall effect, and predicted the existence of additional states as well as quasiparticle excitations with fractional electric charge , both of which were later experimentally observed. Laughlin received one third of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1998 for this discovery. Being a trial wavefunction, it is not exact, but qualitatively, it reproduces many features of the exact solution and quantitatively, it has very high overlaps with the exact ground state for small systems.


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