The Chern-Simons approach has been widely used to explain fractional quantum
Hall states in the framework of trial wave functions. In the present paper, we
generalise the concept of Chern-Simons transformations to systems with any
number of components (spin or pseudospin degrees of freedom), extending earlier
results for systems with one or two components. We treat the density
fluctuations by adding auxiliary gauge fields and appropriate constraints. The
Hamiltonian is quadratic in these fields and hence can be treated as a harmonic
oscillator Hamiltonian, with a ground state that is connected to the Halperin
wave functions through the plasma analogy. We investigate several conditions on
the coefficients of the Chern-Simons transformation and on the filling factors
under which our model is valid. Furthermore, we discuss several singular cases,
associated with symmetric states.Comment: 11 pages, shortened version, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.