Detecting the anyon braiding and topological vacuum bubbles in an anyon interferometer

H.-S. Sim, Cheolhee Han, Byeongmok Lee

Cheolhee Han, Jinhong Park, Yuval Gefen +1 more

According to a basic rule of fermionic and bosonic many-body physics, known as the linked cluster theorem, physical observables are not affected by vacuum bubbles, which represent virtual particles created from vacuum and self-annihilating without interacting with real particles. Here we show that this conventional knowledge must be revised for anyons, quasiparticles that obey fractional exchange statistics intermediate between fermions and bosons. We find that a certain class of vacuum bubbles of Abelian anyons does affect physical observables. They represent virtually excited anyons that wind around real anyonic excitations. These topological bubbles result in a temperature-dependent phase shift of Fabry-Perot interference patterns in the fractional quantum Hall regime accessible in current experiments, thus providing a tool for direct and unambiguous observation of elusive fractional statistics.

Yao Shen, Qing Ai, Gui Lu Long

Parsa Bonderson, Lukasz Fidkowski, Michael Hartley Freedman +1 more

Three manifold topology is used to analyze the effect of anyonic interferometers in which the probe anyons' path along an arm crosses itself, leading to a "twisted" or braided space-time trajectory for the probe anyons. In the case of Ising non-Abelian anyons, twisted interferometry is shown to be able to generate a topologically protected $π/8$-phase gate, which cannot be generated from quasiparticle braiding.

Parsa Bonderson, Michael Hartley Freedman, Chetan Nayak

Francesco Debortoli, Fabian Grusdt

The manipulation of non-Abelian anyons is a foundational ingredient for topological quantum computing and underlies topologically protected quantum memories. Here we analyze a quantum-impurity-based protocol for braiding non-Abelian anyons. Exploiting mobile impurities with addressable internal spin states, we provide a concrete protocol to experimentally measure the matrix elements of the $R$ and $F$ matrices that characterize the non-Abelian statistics of anyons. In particular, focusing on the case of Ising and Fibonacci anyons, we illustrate how the anyonic nature of the excitations emerges directly in the Ramsey interferometer we propose. Building on this framework, we further introduce a conventional-to-topological qubit encoder to transfer quantum information from conventional flying qubits into a topologically protected quantum memory.