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Published January 2013 | Supplemental Material + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Exotic non-Abelian anyons from conventional fractional quantum Hall states

Abstract

Non-Abelian anyons—particles whose exchange noncommutatively transforms a system's quantum state—are widely sought for the exotic fundamental physics they harbour and for quantum computing applications. Numerous blueprints now exist for stabilizing the simplest type of non-Abelian anyon, defects binding Majorana modes, by interfacing widely available materials. Here we introduce a device fabricated from conventional fractional quantum Hall states and s-wave superconductors that supports exotic non-Abelian defects binding parafermionic zero modes, which generalize Majorana bound states. We show that these new modes can be experimentally identified (and distinguished from Majoranas) using Josephson measurements. We also provide a practical recipe for braiding parafermionic zero modes and show that they give rise to non-Abelian statistics. Interestingly, braiding in our setup produces a richer set of topologically protected operations when compared with the Majorana case. As a byproduct, we establish a new, experimentally realistic Majorana platform in weakly spin–orbit-coupled materials such as gallium arsenide.

Additional Information

© 2013 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited. Received 14 Sep 2012; Accepted 26 Nov 2012; Published 8 Jan 2013. We thank N. H. Lindner for conversations on independent parallel work (with E. Berg, G. Refael and A. Stern). We also thank P. Fendley for openly sharing unpublished results with us, P. Bonderson, J.P. Eisenstein, L. Fidkowski, M.P.A. Fisher, A. Kitaev, S. Simon and Z. Wang for helpful discussions, and Microsoft Station Q for hospitality. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation through grants DMR-1055522 (D.J.C. and J.A.) and DMR-0748925 (K.S.), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (J.A.), the DARPA-QuEST program (D.J.C. and K.S.), and the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontier Center with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (D.C. and J.A.). Author contributions: D.J.C. conceived the experimental realizations, devised the braiding methodology and performed the mathematical analysis. All authors contributed to conceptual developments and manuscript preparation.

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Submitted - 1204.5479.pdf

Supplemental Material - ncomms2340-s1.pdf

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