Composite fermionization of bosons in rapidly rotating atomic traps

The nonperturbative effect of interaction can sometimes make interacting bosons behave as though they were free fermions. The system of neutral bosons in a rapidly rotating atomic trap is equivalent to charged bosons coupled to a magnetic field, which has opened up the possibility of a fractional quantum Hall effect for bosons interacting with a short-range interaction. Motivated by the composite fermion theory of a the fractional Hall effect of electrons, we test the idea that the interacting bosons map onto noninteracting spinless fermions carrying one vortex each, by comparing wave functions incorporating this physics with exact wave functions available for systems containing up to 12 bosons. We study here the analogy between interacting bosons at filling factors d=n (n+1) with noninteracting fermions at d*=n for the ground state as well as the low-energy excited states and find that it provides a good account of the behavior for small n, but interactions between fermions become increasingly important with n. At d=1, which is obtained in the limit n, the fermionization appears to overcompensate for the repulsive interaction between bosons, producing an attractive interaction between fermions, as evidenced by a pairing of fermions here.