We study topological order and edge excitations of the \ensuremath{\nu}=1/2 fractional quantum Hall state (FQH) of spin polarized electrons in a single-layer system. We find that the 1/2 FQH state obtained in the numerical study of Greiter et al. has a non-Abelian topological order suggested by Moore and Read. The edge excitations in such a non-Abelian FQH state are found to be described by the U(1) Kac-Moody algebra plus a chiral Majorana fermion theory. The electron and the quasiparticle propagators are calculated. Some experimental consequences are also discussed.
"Topological ordered" phases such as gapped quantum spin-liquids and fractional quantum Hall states possess ground state degeneracy on a torus. We show that the topological nature of this degeneracy has interesting consequences for the entanglement structure of the degenerate ground states. This leads to a simple method for detecting topological order, which is ready-made for numerical schemes such as density matrix renormalization group. The method is valid for phases that do or do not possess edge states alike. We demonstrate it by calculating the entanglement spectrum and the topological entanglement entropy for a chiral spin-liquid state on a 18 site system.