Effective hypernetted-chain study of even-denominator-filling state of the fractional quantum Hall effect

The microscopic approach for studying the half-filled state of the fractional quantum Hall effect is based on the idea of proposing a trial Fermi wave function of the Jastrow-Slater form, which is then fully projected onto the lowest Landau level. A simplified starting point is to drop the projection operator and to consider an unprojected wave function. A recent study claims that such a wave function approximated in a Jastrow form may still constitute a good starting point on the study of the half-filled state. In this paper we formalize the effective hypernetted-chain approximation and apply it to the unprojected Fermi wave function, which describes the even-denominator-filling states. We test the above approximation by using the Fermi hypernettedchain theory, which constitutes the natural choice for the present case. Our results suggest that the approximation of the Slater determinant of plane waves as a Jastrow wave function may not be a very accurate approximation. We conclude that the lowest Landau-level projection operator cannot be neglected if one wants a better quantitative understanding of the phenomena. @S0163-1829~99!01416-2#