Charge and statistics of lattice quasiholes from density measurements: A tree tensor network study

Abstract

We numerically investigate the properties of the quasihole excitations above the bosonic fractional Chern insulator state at filling nu = 1/2, in the specific case of the Harper-Hofstadter Hamiltonian with hard-core interactions. For this purpose, we employ a tree tensor network technique, which allows us to study systems with up to N = 18 particles on a 16 x 16 lattice and experiencing an additional harmonic confinement. First, we observe the quantization of the quasihole charge at fractional values and its robustness against the shape and strength of the impurity potentials used to create and localize such excitations. Then, we numerically characterize quasihole anyonic statistics by applying a discretized version of the relation connecting the statistics of quasiholes in the lowest Landau level to the depletions they create in the density profile [E. Macaluso et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 266801 (2019)]. Our results give a direct proof of the anyonic statistics for quasiholes of fractional Chern insulators, starting from a realistic Hamiltonian. Moreover, they provide strong indications that this property can be experimentally probed through local density measurements, making our scheme readily applicable in state-of-the-art experiments with ultracold atoms and superconducting qubits.