GROUND-STATE DEGENERACY OF THE FRACTIONAL QUANTUM HALL STATES IN THE PRESENCE OF A RANDOM POTENTIAL AND ON HIGH-GENUS RIEMANN SURFACES

The fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states are shown to have qf foldg ground-state degeneracy on a Riemann surface of genus g, where qIf is the ground-state degeneracy in a torus topology. The ground-state degeneracies are directly related to the statistics of the quasiparticles given by =pf/qf. The ground-state degeneracy is shown to be invariant against weak but otherwise arbitrary perturbations. Therefore the ground-state degeneracy provides a new quantum number, in addition to the Hall conductance, characterizing different phases of the FQH systems. The phases with different ground-state degeneracies are considered to have different topological orders. For a finite system of size L, the ground-state degeneracy is lifted. The energy splitting is shown to be at most of order e-L. We also show that the Ginzburg-Landau theory of the FQH states (in the low-energy limit) is a dual theory of the U(1) Chern-Simons topological theory. © 1990 The American Physical Society.