Meron ground states of quantum Hall droplets

We argue that topological meron excitations, which are in a strong coupling phase (bound in pairs) in infinite quantum Hall ferromagnets, become deconfined in finite-size quantum Hall systems. Although effectively for larger systems meron energy grows with the size of the system, when gyromagnetic ratio is small meron becomes the lowest-lying state of a quantum Hall droplet. This comes as a consequence of the many-body correlations built in the meron construction that minimize the interaction energy. We demonstrate this by using mean-field ansatzes for meron wave function. The ansatzes will enable us to consider much larger system sizes than in the previous work [A. Petkovi {c} \'{c}{} and M. V. Milovanovi {c} \'{c}{}, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 066808 (2007)], where fractionalization into merons was introduced.