Towards a field theory of the fractional quantum Hall states

R. Shankar, Ganpathy Murthy

Published 1997-02-11, updated 1997-12-16Version 2

We present a Chern-Simons theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect in which flux attachment is followed by a transformation that effectively attaches the correlation holes. We extract the correlated wavefunctions, compute the drift and cyclotron currents (due to inhomogeneous density), exhibit the Read operator, and operators that create quasi-particles and holes. We show how the bare kinetic energy can get quenched and replaced by one due to interactions. We find that for $\nu =1/2$ the low energy theory has neutral quasiparticles and give the effective hamiltonian and constraints.