Speaker
Kun Yang
(Florida State University)
Description
Recently there have been experimental attempts to realize
quantum Hall physics in trapped cold atom systems, either
through rotation or synthetic gauge fields. In this talk I will
discuss possible quantum phase transitions between integer
and fractional quantum Hall states, driven by attractive
interactions between fermionic atoms. Such transitions have
no counterparts in electronic quantum Hall liquids, but are
related to fractionalization transitions studied in other
strongly correlated systems. In one of these examples charge
fractionalization is associated with the confinement-
deconfinement transition of the (2+1D) Z2 gauge theory,
which is in the Ising universality class.
