Abstract:

Particles other than bosons and fermions can exist in two dimensions. One possibility is that when one particle makes a circle around another particle the total many-particle wave function acquires a non-trivial phase factor. Such particles are called Abelian anyons. In a more exotic situation, the operations of braiding a particle around another are represented by unitary matrices acting on the quantum-state vector. If the braiding matrices do not commute with each other, the particles are called non-Abelian anyons. The existence of Abelian and non-Abelian anyons has been predicted in Fractional Quantum Hall systems but no experimental observation of anyonic statistics has been reported so far. We show that transport measurements in the non-trivial topology of the electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer can be used to probe anyonic statistics.



References:

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