Tao-Thouless Revisited

It is now established that the state proposed by Tao and Thouless for the fractional quantum Hall effect in 1983, shortly after Laughlin's work, is the ground state in the so-called Tao-Thouless limit, and that it is adiabatically connected to the Laughlin state. We review the interesting history of the Tao-Thouless state, and its generalizations, and discuss its relevance and shortcomings. In particular, we calculate the exclusion statistics of quasiparticles in the Tao-Thouless limit and point out a principal difficulty which prevents calculation of the fractional exchange statistics in this limit.