Non-Abelian anyons can exist as pointlike particles in two-dimensional systems and have particle exchange statistics which are neither bosonic nor fermionic. Like in spin systems, the role of fusion (Heisenberg-like) interactions between anyons has been well studied. However, unlike our understanding of the role of bosonic and fermionic statistics in the formation of different quantum phases of matter, little is known concerning the effect of non-Abelian braid statistics. We explore this physics using an anyonic Hubbard model on a two-legged ladder which includes braiding and nearest-neighbor Heisenberg interactions among anyons. We study two of the most prominent non-Abelian anyon models: the Fibonacci and Ising types. We discover rich phase diagrams for both anyon models and show the different roles of their fusion and braid statistics.
Non-Abelian anyons can exist as pointlike particles in two-dimensional systems and have particle exchange statistics which are neither bosonic nor fermionic. Like in spin systems, the role of fusion (Heisenberg-like) interactions between anyons has been well studied. However, unlike our understanding of the role of bosonic and fermionic statistics in the formation of different quantum phases of matter, little is known concerning the effect of non-Abelian braid statistics. We explore this physics using an anyonic Hubbard model on a two-legged ladder which includes braiding and nearest-neighbor Heisenberg interactions among anyons. We study two of the most prominent non-Abelian anyon models: the Fibonacci and Ising types. We discover rich phase diagrams for both anyon models and show the different roles of their fusion and braid statistics.
Anyons exist as pointlike particles in two dimensions and carry braid statistics, which enable interactions that are independent of the distance between the particles. Except for a relatively few number of models, which are analytically tractable, much of the physics of anyons remains still unexplored. In this paper, we show how U(1) symmetry can be combined with the previously proposed anyonic matrix product states to simulate ground states and dynamics of anyonic systems on a lattice at any rational particle number density. We provide proof of principle by studying itinerant anyons on a one-dimensional chain where no natural notion of braiding arises and also on a two-leg ladder where the anyons hop between sites and possibly braid. We compare the result of the ground-state energies of Fibonacci anyons against hardcore bosons and spinless fermions. In addition, we report the entanglement entropies of the ground states of interacting Fibonacci anyons on a fully filled two-leg ladder at different interaction strength, identifying gapped or gapless points in the parameter space. As an outlook, our approach can also prove useful in studying the time dynamics of a finite number of non-Abelian anyons on a finite two-dimensional lattice.
Two-dimensional many-body quantum systems can exhibit topological order and support collective excitations with anyonic statistics different from the usual fermionic or bosonic ones. With the emergence of these exotic point-like particles, it is natural to ask what phases can arise in interacting many-anyon systems. To study this topic, we consider the particular case of Fibonacci anyons subject to an anyonic tight-binding model with nearest-neighbor repulsion on a two-leg ladder. Focusing on the case of half-filling, for low interaction strengths an “anyonic” metal is found, whereas for strong repulsion, the anyons form an insulating charge-density wave. Within the latter regime, we introduce an effective one-dimensional model up to sixth order in perturbation theory arising from anyonic superexchange processes. We numerically identify four distinct phases of the effective model, which we characterize using matrix product state methods. These include both the ferro- and antiferromagnetic golden chain phases, as well as phases with Z 2 and incommensurate correlations.
As opposed to classical mechanics, quantum mechanical particles can be truly identical and lead to new and interesting phenomena. Identical particles can be of different types, determined by their exchange symmetry, which in turn gives rise to statistical repulsion. The exchange symmetry is given by a representation of the exchange group; the fundamental group of the configuration space of identical particles. In three dimensions the exchange group is the permutation group and there are only two types of identical particles; bosons and fermions. While any number of bosons can be at the same place or in the same state, fermions repel each other. In two dimensions the exchange group is the braid group and essentially any exchange symmetry is allowed, such particles are called anyons. Abelian anyons are described by abelian representations of the exchange group and can be seen as giving a continuous interpolation between bosons and fermions. Non-abelian anyons are much more complex and their statistical repulsion is yet largely unexplored. We use the framework of modular tensor categories to show how the statistical repulsion of non-abelian anyons depends on the exchange symmetry. The Fibonacci anyon model is studied, for which explicit results are obtained. We also show how Fibonacci anyons can be used to implement topological quantum computation, providing topologically stable quantum information encoded in the state of non-abelian anyons that can be manipulated via the non-abelian exchange symmetry.
Phase diagram for hard-core Z3 anyons on the ladder
Studies of free particles in low-dimensional quantum systems such as two-leg ladders provide insight into the influence of statistics on collective behaviour. The behaviours of bosons and fermions are well understood, but two-dimensional systems also admit excitations with alternative statistics known as anyons. Numerical analysis of hard-core Z3 anyons on the ladder reveals qualitatively distinct behaviour, including a novel phase transition associated with crystallisation of hole degrees of freedom into a periodic foam. Qualitative predictions are extrapolated for all Abelian Zq anyon models.
"Anyonic quantum statistics is an exotic phenomenon of identical particles in quantum mechanics. When particles are confined in two spatial dimensions, exchanges of identical particles can induce phase factors in the wave function of Abelian anyons or matrix valued transformations of the wave function of non-Abelian anyons. As a result, systems of anyons may have richer properties than those of bosons and fermions in three spatial dimensions. There is strong theoretical support for the existence of anyons in some engineered two-dimensional systems such as 2D electron gases, strongly correlated spin lattices and as edge modes of nanowires. In the future, anyons could be used in topological quantum computation to perform highly efficient information processing with very small error rates. The phases of matter described by dynamically interacting anyons have recently been studied in chains where anyons interact via Heisenberg-type exchange interactions. In this thesis, new kind of anyonic interactions are studied, induced purely by braiding during free evolution. Such interactions are of topological origin, and the information about the interactions is stored non-locally. A quantum walk model is used to study the effects of these braiding interactions on the dynamical behaviour of anyons. The anyonic quantum walk is a quasi-one-dimensional generalization of the discrete-time quantum walk which allows the simulation of anyonic dynamics analytically. The moving anyon and a chain of stationary anyons interact via braiding statistics, and the behaviour of the anyon is studied in three cases. Striking differences are found between particles with conventional boson or fermion statistics and non-Abelian anyonic statistics. The random walk is a dynamical model that describes the motion of a particle on a lattice. In physics, it is used to describe Brownian motion of fluids and gases. In such systems, energy transport is diffusive, and the order of the system approaches a highly mixed state without any information content. The quantum version of the random walk, the quantum walk, has nonintuitive properties. Generally, the information content in a unitarily evolving system is fixed, which leads to unexpected transport phenomena. An initially localized particle does not propagate diffusively, but escapes the starting point with ballistic speed. Most of our results for non-Abelian anyons use the Ising model anyon which is most likely to be measured in experiments. First, when each anyonic site is occupied by one Ising anyon, the propagation of the anyon becomes diffusive. More precisely, the variance of the spatial probability distribution of the particle depends linearly on the number of time steps. This is in stark contrast to bosons, fermions and Abelian anyons which propagate ballistically, and the variance depends linearly on the square of the number of time steps. The essential reason for this slowdown is that the non-Abelian anyons possess an extra degree of freedom called the fusion Hilbert space. This space can be viewed as an environment for the normal degrees of freedom of the particle, inducing decoherence in the quantum walk. This thesis opens the line for studies of this novel kind of decoherence mechanism in quantum walks. In the second case the study is extended to more general anyon models by losing some of the information about the history of the evolution. In this case the system is subject to decoherence, and the total system evolution is not unitary. The behaviour of the particle in this model is found to be diffusive for all the non-Abelian anyon models studied, while Abelian anyons behave ballistically also in this model. One peculiarity of quantum systems is their behaviour under disorder. Quantum mechanical particles moving in random local potentials are known to freeze and not move at all. Such a phenomenon is known as Anderson localization. Studies have shown that Anderson localization happens also in quantum walks with random spatial fluctuations in the coin parameters. In the third case, the transport properties of anyons are studied under topological randomness, allowing the occupations of anyons change between experiments. Bosons and fermions would propagate ballistically under such randomness, and Abelian anyons are shown to localize. The results show that non-Abelian anyons behave diffusively at short time scales, and it is argued that they do so in the long time limit as well. In all cases, non-Abelian anyons are shown to have very different dynamical properties than bosons, fermions and Abelian anyons. A possible simulation of the anyonic quantum walk in Fractional Quantum Hall systems is also discussed.
Quantum spin models have been studied extensively in one and higher dimensions. Furthermore, these systems have been doped with holes to study $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ models of SU(2) spin-1/2. Their anyonic counterparts can be built from non-Abelian anyons, such as Fibonacci anyons described by SU(2)3 theories, which are quantum deformations of the SU(2) algebra. Inspired by the physics of SU(2) spins, several works have explored ladders of Fibonacci anyons and also one-dimensional (1D) $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ models. Here, we aim to explore the combined effects of extended dimensionality and doping by studying ladders composed of coupled chains of interacting itinerant Fibonacci anyons. We show analytically that in the limit of strong rung couplings these models can be mapped onto effective 1D models. These effective models can either be gapped models of hole pairs, or gapless models described by $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ (or modified $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J\text{\ensuremath{-}}V$) chains of Fibonacci anyons, whose spectrum exhibits a fractionalization into charge and anyon degrees of freedom. The charge degrees of freedom are described by the hardcore boson spectra while the anyon sector is given by a chain of localized interacting anyons. By using exact diagonalizations for two-leg and three-leg ladders, we show that indeed the doped ladders show exactly the same behavior as that of $t\text{\ensuremath{-}}J$ chains. In the strong ferromagnetic rung limit, we can obtain a new model that hosts two different kinds of Fibonacci particles, which we denote as the heavy $\ensuremath{\tau}$'s and light $\ensuremath{\tau}$'s. These two particle types carry the same (non-Abelian) topological charge but different (Abelian) electric charges. Once again, we map the two-dimensional ladder onto an effective chain carrying these heavy and light $\ensuremath{\tau}$'s. We perform a finite size scaling analysis to show the appearance of gapless modes for certain anyon densities, whereas a topological gapped phase is suggested for another density regime.