Flavor altering excitations of composite fermions

Past theoretical studies have considered excitations of a given flavor of composite fermions across composite-fermion quasi-Landau levels. We show that in addition there exists a ladder of flavor changing excitations in which composite fermions are partially dissociated by a removal of some or all of their vortices, and suggest that these are relevant to the intriguing experimental discovery of Hirjibehedin et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 186802 (2003)] of coexisting excitation modes of composite fermions of different flavors in the filling factor range 1/3 > nu > or = 1/5.