Anyons from fermions with conventional two-body interactions

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how emergent anyons with toric code fusion rules and mutual semionic statistics can arise from a conventional two-body fermion model, enabling potential quantum computing applications.

Contribution

It reveals that a two-component fermion model with standard interactions can produce anyonic excitations similar to those in topological quantum systems.

Findings

Subsets of low-lying excitations obey toric code fusion rules.

String-like excitations exhibit mutual semionic statistics.

Manipulation of anyons is feasible in cold atom systems.

Abstract

Emergent anyons are the key elements of the topological quantum computation and topological quantum memory. We study a two-component fermion model with conventional two-body interaction in an open boundary condition and show that several subsets in the low-lying excitations obey the same fusion rules as those of the toric code model. Those string-like non-local excitations in a given subset obey mutual semionic statistics. We show how to peel off one of such subset from other degenerate subsets and manipulate anyons in cold dipolar Fermi atoms or cold dipolar fermionic heteronuclear molecules in optical lattices by means of the established techniques.