Coupled-wire Construction of a Non-crystalline Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

Abstract: The fractional quantum Hall effect, a paradigmatic topologically ordered state, has been realised in two-dimensional strongly correlated quantum gases and Chern bands of crystals. Here we construct a non-crystalline analogue by coupling quantum wires that are not periodically placed in real-space. Remarkably, the model remains solvable using bosonisation techniques. Due to the non-uniform couplings between the wires, the ground state has different degeneracy compared to the crystalline case. It displays a rich phenomenology of excitations, which can either behave like anyons confined to move in one dimension (lineons), anyons confined to hop between two wires (s-lineons), and anyonic excitations that are free to travel across the system. Both the ground state degeneracy and mutual statistics are directly determined by the real-space positions of the wires. By providing an analytically solvable model of a non-crystalline fractional quantum Hall effect, our work showcases that topological order can display richer phenomenology beyond crystals. More broadly, the non-uniform wire construction we develop can serve as a tool to explore richer many-body phenomenology in non-crystalline systems.