The quantum-mechanical description of assemblies of particles whose motion is confined to two (or one) spatial dimensions offers many possibilities that are distinct from bosons and fermions. We call such particles anyons. The simplest anyons are parameterized by an angular phase parameter $θ$. $θ= 0, π$ correspond to bosons and fermions respectively; at intermediate values we say that we have fractional statistics. In two dimensions, $θ$ describes the phase acquired by the wave function as two anyons wind around one another counterclockwise. It generates a shift in the allowed values for the relative angular momentum. Composites of localized electric charge and magnetic flux associated with an abelian U(1) gauge group realize this behavior. More complex charge-flux constructions can involve non-abelian and product groups acting on a spectrum of allowed charges and fluxes, giving rise to nonabelian and mutual statistics. Interchanges of non-abelian anyons implement unitary transformations of the wave function within an emergent space of internal states. Anyons of all kinds are described by quantum field theories that include Chern--Simons terms. The crossings of one-dimensional anyons on a ring are uni-directional, such that a fractional phase $θ$ acquired upon interchange gives rise to fractional shifts in the relative momenta between the anyons. The quasiparticle excitations of fractional quantum Hall states have long been predicted to include anyons. Recently the anyon behavior predicted for quasiparticles in the $ν= 1/3$ fractional quantum Hall state has been observed both in scattering and in interferometric experiments. Excitations within designed systems, notably including superconducting circuits, can exhibit anyon behavior. Such systems are being developed for possible use in quantum information processing.
The quantum-mechanical description of assemblies of particles whose motion is confined to two (or one) spatial dimensions offers many possibilities that are distinct from bosons and fermions. We call such particles anyons. The simplest anyons are parameterized by an angular phase parameter θ. θ=0,π correspond to bosons and fermions respectively; at intermediate values we say that we have fractional statistics. In two dimensions, θ describes the phase acquired by the wave function as two anyons wind around one another counterclockwise. It generates a shift in the allowed values for the relative angular momentum. Composites of localized electric charge and magnetic flux associated with an abelian U(1) gauge group realize this behavior. More complex charge-flux constructions can involve non-abelian and product groups acting on a spectrum of allowed charges and fluxes, giving rise to nonabelian and mutual statistics. Interchanges of non-abelian anyons implement unitary transformations of the wave function within an emergent space of internal states. Anyons of all kinds are described by quantum field theories that include Chern--Simons terms. The crossings of one-dimensional anyons on a ring are uni-directional, such that a fractional phase θ acquired upon interchange gives rise to fractional shifts in the relative momenta between the anyons. The quasiparticle excitations of fractional quantum Hall states have long been predicted to include anyons. Recently the anyon behavior predicted for quasiparticles in the ν=1/3 fractional quantum Hall state has been observed both in scattering and in interferometric experiments. Excitations within designed systems, notably including superconducting circuits, can exhibit anyon behavior. Such systems are being developed for possible use in quantum information processing.
The quantum-mechanical description of assemblies of particles whose motion is confined to two (or one) spatial dimensions offers many possibilities that are distinct from bosons and fermions. We call such particles anyons. The simplest anyons are parameterized by an angular phase parameter θ. θ = 0, π correspond to bosons and fermions, respectively; at intermediate values, we say that we have fractional statistics. In two dimensions, θ describes the phase acquired by the wave function as two anyons wind around one another counterclockwise. It generates a shift in the allowed values for the relative angular momentum. Composites of localized electric charge and magnetic flux associated with an abelian U(1) gauge group realize this behavior. More complex charge-flux constructions can involve nonabelian and product groups acting on a spectrum of allowed charges and fluxes, giving rise to nonabelian and mutual statistics. Interchanges of nonabelian anyons implement unitary transformations of the wave function within an emergent space of internal states. Anyons of all kinds are described by quantum field theories that include Chern–Simons terms. The crossings of one-dimensional anyons on a ring are unidirectional, such that a fractional phase θ acquired upon interchange gives rise to fractional shifts in the relative momenta between the anyons. The quasiparticle excitations of fractional quantum Hall states have long been predicted to include anyons. Recently, the anyon behavior predicted for quasiparticles in the ν = 1/3 fractional quantum Hall state has been observed in both scattering and interferometric experiments. Excitations within designed systems, notably including superconducting circuits, can exhibit anyon behavior. Such systems are being developed for possible use in quantum information processing.
Anyons and fractional statistics are by now well established in two-dimensional systems. In one dimension, fractional statistics has been established so far only through Haldane's fractional exclusion principle, but not via a fractional phase the wave function acquires as particles are interchanged. At first sight, the topology of the configuration space appears to preclude such phases in one dimension. Here we argue that the crossings of one-dimensional anyons are always unidirectional, which makes it possible to assign phases consistently and hence to introduce a statistical angle $\ensuremath{\theta}$. The fractional statistics then manifests itself in fractional spacings of the single-particle momenta of the anyons when periodic boundary conditions are imposed. These spacings are given by $\ensuremath{\Delta}p=2\ensuremath{\pi}\ensuremath{\hbar}/L(|\ensuremath{\theta}|/\ensuremath{\pi}+\text{non-negative}\text{ }\text{integer})$ for a system of length L. This condition is the analog of the quantization of relative angular momenta according to ${l}_{\text{z}}=\ensuremath{\hbar}(\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\theta}/\ensuremath{\pi}+2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\text{integer})$ for two-dimensional anyons.
The general formulation of quantum statistical mechanics hints at interesting generalizations of the usual Bose/Fermi framework in two spatial dimensions. Anyon statistics, which is essentially a continuous interpolation between Bose and Fermi statistics, is relevant to the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect in two-dimensional (i.e., thin layer) condensed matter systems. In addition, the possibility of non-abelian statistics, in which the multi-particle wavefunction transforms as a representation of a non-abelian group under the exchange of indistinguishable particles, has been explored. Spontaneously broken non-abelian gauge theories in (2 + 1) dimensions often have stable topological defects, called non-abelian vortices, that experience non-abelian statistics. In addition, it has been suggested that degenerate quasihole multiplets in Quantum Hall systems also transform as non-abelian representations of the braid group under particle exchange. In this thesis, I explore the braiding properties of systems of two-cycle flux vortices in a residual S₃ discrete gauge group. The individual vortices are uncharged, but multi-vortex states can have Cheshire charge. The uncharged sectors all have non-vanishing bosonic subspaces, as do the non-abelian charged trivial flux sectors. A kinetic Hamiltonian for vortices on a periodic lattice is constructed. There is a modification to the translational symmetry in the periodically identified direction for non-trivial Z₂ charged sectors. The ground state energies for various three and four vortex sectors is numerically determined. Typically, the ground state is bosonic, with a gap separating it from a non-abelian subspace.
"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.
We construct models of interacting itinerant non-Abelian anyons moving along one-dimensional chains. We focus on itinerant Ising (Majorana) and Fibonacci anyons, which are, respectively, related to SU(2)2 and SU(2)3 anyons and also, respectively, describe quasiparticles of the Moore-Read and Z3-Read-Rezayi fractional quantum Hall states. Following the derivation of the electronic large-U effective Hubbard model, we derive effective anyonic t-J models for the low-energy sectors. Solving these models by exact diagonalization, we find a fractionalization of the anyons into charge and (neutral) anyonic degrees of freedom---a generalization of spin-charge separation of electrons which occurs in Luttinger liquids. A detailed description of the excitation spectrum can be performed by combining spectra for charge and anyonic sectors. The anyonic sector is that of a squeezed chain of localized interacting anyons and, hence, is described by the same conformal field theory (CFT), with central charge c=1/2 for Ising anyons and c=7/10 or c=4/5 for Fibonacci anyons with antiferromagnetic or ferromagnetic coupling, respectively. The charge sector is the spectrum of a chain of hard-core bosons subject to phase shifts which coincide with the momenta of the combined anyonic eigenstates, revealing a subtle coupling between charge and anyonic excitations at the microscopic level (which we also find to be present in Luttinger liquids), despite the macroscopic fractionalization. The combined central charge extracted from the entanglement entropy between segments of the chain is shown to be 1+c, where c is the central charge of the underlying CFT of the localized anyon (squeezed) chain.
Master's thesis in Theoretical Physics. The official university title is "Fractional Quantum Hall Effect: Current State and Perspectives"; this record uses the author's preferred, more descriptive title. This thesis develops a unified description of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) and topological order through three complementary frameworks: microscopic trial many-body wavefunctions, the algebraic theory of anyons and unitary modular tensor categories, and Chern-Simons effective field theory. The first part covers the physical foundations—Landau quantization, the TKNN invariant, Laughlin's wavefunctions, the hierarchy and composite fermion theories, and some non-Abelian states like the Moore-Read Pfaffian state. The second part develops the algebraic theory of anyons, from the braid group to fusion rules, quantum dimensions, topological spins, and the F- and R-matrices that characterize a unitary modular tensor category. The third part constructs the Chern-Simons effective field theory, deriving fractional charge, statistics, and ground-state degeneracy, unifying Abelian states via the K-matrix formalism, and then generalizing to non-Abelian states through 𝑈(1)ₘ × 𝑆𝑈(𝑁)ₖ Chern-Simons theory. The central result is that Chern–Simons theory provides a field-theoretic realization of the topological order introduced microscopically and algebraically in the earlier chapters, closing the circle between the three descriptions and providing a unified framework for the FQHE and topological order and anyon's physics.