Abstract

We demonstrate how to directly study non-Abelian statistics for a wide class of exactly solvable many-body quantum systems. By employing exact eigenstates to simulate the adiabatic transport of a model's quasi-particles, the resulting Berry phase provides a direct demonstration of their non-Abelian statistics. We apply this technique to Kitaev's honeycomb lattice model and explicitly demonstrate the existence of non-Abelian Ising anyons confirming the previous conjectures. Finally, we present the manipulations needed to transport and detect the statistics of these quasi-particles in the laboratory. Various physically realistic system sizes are considered and exact predictions for such experiments are provided.

Highlights

  • A striking feature of topological phases of matter is that they can support anyons

  • Other proposals include the p-wave superconductor [5, 6] as well as various lattice models [7, 8, 9]. These systems are either tailored to identically support non-Abelian statistics and have complex physical realizations, or they can be described by simple Hamiltonians, but their statistical behavior is based on indirect arguments

  • When the positions are swapped twice, i.e. a particle winds around the other along a suitable chosen path, the statistics corresponds to the accumulated wave function evolution, which is given by the Berry phase, or the holonomy [10, 16]

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Summary

Introduction

A striking feature of topological phases of matter is that they can support anyons. These are quasiparticles with statistics different from bosons or fermions. Other proposals include the p-wave superconductor [5, 6] as well as various lattice models [7, 8, 9] These systems are either tailored to identically support non-Abelian statistics and have complex physical realizations, or they can be described by simple Hamiltonians, but their statistical behavior is based on indirect arguments. By applying the Berry phase technique [10] to the Kitaev’s honeycomb spin lattice model [9], we calculate the evolution associated with an adiabatic exchange of quasiparticles. This is performed using exact eigenstates of a 360 spin system.

The honeycomb lattice model
The Ising anyon model
Non-Abelian statistics as a holonomy
Braiding and detection of the non-Abelian statistics in a laboratory
Conclusions

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