Ideal Chern bands are believed to be crucial to realizing the recently discovered fractional quantum Hall states at zero magnetic field. However, the nature of even the most archetypical Laughlin states and its competition with other phases remains poorly understood in this setting. We rigorously demonstrate that the Laughlin wave-function in ideal Chern bands is unstable to a novel gapless dielectric phase. Even the celebrated filling 1/3 state crystallizes into a correlated phase with continuously tunable power-law exponents, and quasiparticles with fractional charges varying smoothly below e/3. Remarkably, this state remains gapless without spontaneous symmetry breaking, exemplifying a form of beyond-Goldstone gaplessness. Our results bridge the physics of fractional quantum Hall and Coulomb gases, and we will discuss potential implications of this finding for moiré materials and its possible connections to critical states in other settings.
