2D or not 2D: a "holographic dictionary" for Lowest Landau Levels

We consider 2D fermions on a plane with a perpendicular magnetic field, described by Landau levels. It is wellknown that, semiclassically, restriction to the lowest Landau levels (LLL) implies two constraints on a 4D phase space, that transforms the 2D coordinate space (x,y) into a 2D phase space, thanks to the non-zero Dirac bracket between x and y. A naive application of Dirac’s prescription of quantizing LLL in terms of L2 functions of x (or of y) fails because the wavefunctions are functions of x and y. We are able, however, to construct a 1D QM, sitting differently inside the 2D QM, which describes the LLL physics. The construction includes an exact 1D-2D correspondence between the fermion density ρ(x,y) and the Wigner distribution of the 1D QM. In a suitable large N limit, (a) the Wigner distribution is upper bounded by 1, since a phase space cell can have at most one fermion (Pauli exclusion principle) and (b) the 1D-2D correspondence becomes an identity transformation. (a) and (b) imply an upper bound for the fermion density ρ(x,y). We also explore the entanglement entropy (EE) of subregions of the 2D noncommutative space. It behaves differently from conventional 2D systems as well as conventional 1D systems, falling somewhere between the two. The main new feature of the EE, directly attributable to the noncommutative space, is the absence of a logarithmic dependence on the size of the entangling region, even though there is a Fermi surface. In this paper, instead of working directly with the Landau problem, we consider a more general problem, of 2D fermions in a rotating harmonic trap, which reduces to the Landau problem in a special limit. Among other consequences of the emergent 1D physics, we find that post-quench dynamics of the (generalized) LLL system is computed more simply in 1D terms, which is described by well-developed methods of 2D phase space hydrodynamics.

💡 Research Summary

The paper investigates the physics of two‑dimensional fermions subjected to a uniform perpendicular magnetic field, focusing on the lowest Landau level (LLL) sector. By reformulating the problem in terms of fermions in a rotating harmonic trap, the authors obtain a generalized Hamiltonian that interpolates between the pure Landau problem (when the rotation frequency equals the trap frequency) and a more generic situation where the two frequencies differ. In this setting the spectrum is labelled by two integers (n₁,n₂) with energies E_{n₁,n₂}=ℏω