2025/09/09 by Cristian Voinea, Voinea, Cristian, Wei Zhu +5 · 1 voice · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.08036
arxiv published 2025/09/09 · arxiv updated 2026/03/25
Quantum Hall bilayers are a uniquely tunable platform that can realize continuous transitions between distinct topological phases of matter. One prominent example is the transition between the Halperin state and the Moore--Read Pfaffian, long predicted to host a critical theory of Majorana fermions but so far not verified in unbiased microscopic simulations. Using the fuzzy sphere regularization, we identify the low-energy spectrum at this transition with the 3D gauged Majorana conformal field theory. We show that the transition is driven by the closing of the neutral fermion gap, and we directly extract the operator content in both integer and half-integer spin sectors. Our results resolve the long-standing question of the nature of a topological phase transition in a setting relevant to quantum Hall experiments, while also providing the first realization of a fermionic theory on the fuzzy sphere, previously limited to bosonic theories.