Variational study of the vortex structure of composite fermions

We consider a one-parameter family of wave functions for composite fermions. There are explicitly two vortices bound to each electron in these wave functions, but the internal structure of the vortices, which governs the short-distance behavior of the two-particle correlation function, is continuously changed by varying the number of zeros at each electron. The kinetic and interaction energies are evaluated using Monte Carlo techniques. It is found that the wave function with equal numbers of zeros and vortices does not in general have the lowest energy, but is energetically quite competitive.