Laughlin’s Wavefunction and the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect#

The 1982-1983 discovery of fractional quantum Hall plateaus and Laughlin’s many-body trial wavefunction that explains them: sampling \(|\Psi_m|^2\) directly by Metropolis Monte Carlo via its “plasma analogy,” and extracting the correlation hole and incompressible-droplet density profile that are its defining signatures.