Certain localised displacement fluctuations in the planar honeycomb lattice may be identified as precursors to topological defects. We show that these fluctuations are among the most pronounced non-affine distortions of an elemental coarse graining volume of the honeycomb structure at non zero temperatures. We obtain the statistics of these precursor modes in the canonical ensemble, evaluating exactly their single point and two-point spatio-temporal distributions, for a lattice with harmonic nearest neighbour and next near neighbour bonds. As the solid is destabilised by tuning interactions, the precursor fluctuations diverge and correlations become long-lived and long-ranged.

We study theoretically the magnetoresistance oscillations near a half-filled lowest Landau level (ν = 1/2) that result from the presence of a periodic one-dimensional electrostatic potential. We use the Dirac composite fermion theory of Son [Phys. Rev. X 5 031027 (2015)], where the ν = 1/2 state is described by a (2+1)-dimensional theory of quantum electrodynamics. We extend previous work that studied these oscillations in the mean-field limit by considering the effects of gauge field fluctuations within a large flavor approximation. A self-consistent analysis of the resulting Schwinger-Dyson equations suggests that fluctuations dynamically generate a Chern-Simons term for the gauge field and a magnetic field-dependent mass for the Dirac composite fermions away from ν = 1/2. We show how this mass results in a shift of the locations of the oscillation minima that improves the comparison with experiment [Kamburov et. al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 196801 (2014)]. The temperature-dependent amplitude of these oscillations may enable an alternative way to measure this mass. This amplitude may also help distinguish the Dirac and Halperin, Lee, and Read composite fermion theories of the half-filled Landau level.

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