Gate-controlled anyon generation and detection in Kitaev spin liquids

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to generate and detect non-Abelian Ising anyons in Kitaev spin liquids using gate voltages in a heterostructure, advancing fault-tolerant quantum computing prospects.

Contribution

It introduces a standalone scheme for creating and detecting Ising anyons via gate control in a heterostructure with a Kitaev spin liquid and semiconductor, with practical experimental guidelines.

Findings

Single Ising anyon can be generated by gate tuning.

Interferometric detection via conductance measurement.

Concrete implementation guidelines for candidate materials.

Abstract

Reliable manipulation of non-Abelian Ising anyons supported by Kitaev spin liquids may enable intrinsically fault-tolerant quantum computation. Here, we introduce a standalone scheme for both generating and detecting individual Ising anyons using tunable gate voltages in a heterostructure containing a non-Abelian Kitaev spin liquid and a monolayer semiconductor. The key ingredients of our setup are a Kondo coupling to stabilize an Ising anyon in the spin liquid around each electron in the semiconductor, and a large charging energy to allow control over the electron numbers in distinct gate-defined regions of the semiconductor. In particular, a single Ising anyon can be generated at a disk-shaped region by gate tuning its electron number to one, while it can be interferometrically detected by measuring the electrical conductance of a ring-shaped region around it whose electron number is allowed to fluctuate between zero and one. We provide concrete experimental guidelines for implementing our proposal in promising candidate materials like $\alpha$-RuCl$_3$.