Readout of Parafermionic States by Transport Measurements

Abstract

Recent experiments have demonstrated the possibility of inducing superconducting pairing into counterpropagating fractional quantum Hall edge modes. This paves the way for the realization of localized parafermionic modes, non-Abelian anyons that share fractional charges in a nonlocal way. We show that, for a pair of isolated parafermions, this joint degree of freedom can be read by conductance measurements across standard metallic electrodes. We propose two complementary setups. We investigate first the transport through a grounded superconductor hosting two interacting parafermions. In the low-energy limit, its conductance peaks reveal their shared fractional charge yielding a three-state telegraph noise for weak quasiparticle poisoning. We then examine the two-terminal electron conductance of a blockaded fractional topological superconductor, which displays a characteristic e/3 periodicity of its zero-bias peaks in the deep topological regime, thus signaling the presence of parafermionic modes.