Hanbury-Brown and Twiss interference of anyons

TL;DR

This paper investigates an HBT interferometer with anyons, revealing how fractional statistics influence correlations and distinguish anyons from bosons and fermions.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed calculation of HBT cross-correlations for Abelian Laughlin anyons, highlighting unique statistical behaviors.

Findings

Partial bunching similar to bosons observed

Distinct qualitative differences from bosonic and fermionic signals

Indications that anyons are not just intermediate particles

Abstract

We present a study of an Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometer realized with anyons. Such a device can directly probe entanglement and fractional statistics of initially uncorrelated particles. We calculate HBT cross-correlations of Abelian Laughlin anyons. The correlations we calculate exhibit partial bunching similar to bosons, indicating a substantial statistical transmuta- tion from the underlying electronic degrees of freedom. We also find qualitative differences between the anyonic signal and the corresponding bosonic or fermionic signals, indicating that anyons cannot be simply thought as intermediate between bosons and fermions.