Fock Parafermions and Self-Dual Representations of the Braid Group
Emilio Cobanera, Gerardo Ortizb
Because of potential relevance to topological quantum information processing, we introduce and study the self-dual family of representations of the braid group. Self-dual representations are physically well motivated and provide a natural generalization of the Majorana and Gaussian representations, which appear as particular instances. To show that self-dual representations admit a particle interpretation, we introduce and describe in second quantization a family of particle species with $p=2,3,\ensuremath{\cdots}$ exclusion and $\ensuremath{\theta}=2\ensuremath{\pi}/p$ exchange statistics. We call these anyons Fock parafermions, because they are the particles naturally associated to the parafermionic zero-energy modes, potentially realizable in mesoscopic arrays of fractional topological insulators. Josephson junctions modeled with Fock parafermions may display a $2\ensuremath{\pi}p$ periodic relation between the Josephson current and the phase difference across the junction. Self-dual representations can be realized in terms of local quadratic combinations of either parafermions or Fock parafermions, an important requisite for physical implementation of quantum logic gates. The second-quantization description of Fock parafermions entails the concept of Fock algebra, i.e., a Fock space endowed with a statistical multiplication that captures and logically correlates these anyons' exclusion and exchange statistics. As a consequence normal ordering continues to be a well-defined operation.
•Jan 1, 2014•31 citations