Stability of fractional Chern insulators with a non-Landau level continuum limit

The stability of fractional Chern insulators is widely believed to be predicted by the resemblance of their single-particle spectra to Landau levels. Here we investigate the scope of this geometric stability hypothesis by analyzing the stability of a set of fractional Chern insulators that explicitly do not have a Landau level continuum limit. By computing the many-body spectra of Laughlin states in a generalized Hofstadter model, we analyze the relationship between single-particle metrics, such as trace inequality saturation, and many-body metrics, such as the magnitude of the many-body and entanglement gaps. We show numerically that the geometric stability hypothesis holds for Chern bands that are not continuously connected to Landau levels, as well as conventional Chern bands, albeit often requiring larger system sizes to converge for these configurations.. Authors: Andrews, Bartholomew [Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0000000290797433); Raja, Mathi [Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000135289620); Mishra, Nimit [Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)] (ORCID:0009000769094358); Zaletel, Michael P. [Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)]; Roy, Rahul [Univ. of California, Los Angeles, CA (United States)]. DOE Contract: AC02-05CH11231. Subjects: 2-dimensional systems; 75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SUPERFLUIDITY; Exact diagonalization; Fractional quantum Hall effect; Geometric & topological phases; Landau levels; Lattice models in condensed matter; Strongly correlated systems