Biorthogonal basis approach to fractional Chern physics

A fractional Chern insulator is thought to emerge from the competition between one-particle band topology and strong repulsive interactions. As an attempt to study lattice models of fractional Chern insulators, we introduce a biorthogonal basis constructed from coherent-like states on the von Neumann lattice. Focusing on the fact that this basis is diagonal to the vortex attachment in the infinite-volume limit, we convert the original fermions into composite fermions by applying a two-dimensional Jordan-Wigner transformation to the creation and annihilation operators of the biorthogonal basis. Furthermore, we apply the Hartree-Fock mean-field approximation to handle the interaction Hamiltonian of composite fermions. Due to the biorthogonal nature, the representation of the new Hamiltonian is no longer Hermitian, which implies that the introduction of the approximation does not guarantee the reality of the energy spectrum. In fact, there are many self-consistent solutions with complex spectra. Nevertheless, we numerically find that it is possible to construct a self-consistent solution where the band dispersion is nearly real and the ground-state energy is lower than in other solutions.