Creation and manipulation of anyons in a layered superconductor-2DEG system

TL;DR

This paper proposes a theoretical system combining a 2DEG and a superconductor to realize and manipulate anyons, offering new methods for their detection and potential quantum computing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel layered system for creating and controlling anyons, with detailed analytical, numerical, and effective models, and suggests experimental measurement techniques.

Findings

Anyons with charge ±e/2 and statistical angle π/4 are realizable.

Multiple modeling approaches confirm the existence of anyons in the system.

Proposed experimental setups enable direct fractional charge measurement and braiding operations.

Abstract

We describe and analyze in detail our recent theoretical proposal for the realization and manipulation of anyons in a weakly interacting system consisting of a two-dimensional electron gas in the integer quantum Hall regime adjacent to a type-II superconducting film with an artificial array of pinning sites. The anyon is realized in response to a defect in the pinned vortex lattice and carries a charge \pm e/2 and a statistical angle pi/4. We establish this result, both analytically and numerically, in three complementary approaches: (i) a continuum model of two-dimensional electrons in the vortex lattice of the superconducting film; (ii) a minimal tight-binding lattice model that captures the essential features of the system; and (iii) an effective theory of the superconducting vortex lattice superposed on the integer quantum Hall state. We propose a novel method to measure the fractional charge directly in a bulk transport experiment and an all-electric setup for an ``anyon shuttle'' implementing the braiding operations. We briefly discuss conditions for fabricating the system in the lab and its potential applications in quantum information processing with non-Abelian anyons.