Quantitative study of large composite-fermion systems

Quantitative investigations of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) have been limited in the past to systems containing typically fewer than 10-12 particles, except for the 1/(2p+1) Laughlin states. We develop a method, using the framework of the composite-fermion theory, that enables a treatment of much bigger systems and makes it possible to obtain accurate quantitative information for other incompressible states as well. After establishing the validity of this method by comparison with few-particle exact-diagonalization results, we compute the ground-state energies and transport gaps for a number of FQHE states.