Landau-Level Mixing and the Emergence of Pfaffian Excitations for the 5/2 Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

We report on exact diagonalization studies for fully spin polarized 5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect, incorporating Landau-level mixing through the Bishara-Nayak effective interaction. We find that there is an experimentally accessible region in the phase diagram where the Pfaffian model accurately describes not only the ground state but also the neutral and charged excitations. These results are consistent with the observed persistence of the 5/2 Hall effect down to very low magnetic fields; they are also relevant to the experimental attempts to detect non-Abelian braid statistics.