Landau-Level Mixing and Particle-Hole Symmetry Breaking for Spin Transitions in the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

The spin transitions in the fractional quantum Hall effect provide a direct measure of the tiny energy differences between differently spin-polarized states and thereby serve as an extremely sensitive test of the quantitative accuracy of the theory of the fractional quantum Hall effect, and, in particular, of the role of Landau-level mixing in lifting the particle-hole symmetry. We report on an accurate quantitative study of this physics, evaluating the effect of Landau-level mixing in a nonperturbative manner using a fixed-phase diffusion Monte Carlo method. We find excellent agreement between our calculated critical Zeeman energies and the experimentally measured values. In particular, we find, as also do experiments, that the critical Zeeman energies for fractional quantum Hall states at filling factors nu = 2 - n/(2n +/- 1) are significantly higher than those for nu = n/(2n +/- 1) a quantitative signature of the lifting of particle-hole symmetry due to Landau-level mixing.