Anyons in a weakly interacting system

TL;DR

This paper proposes a system where anyons with specific exchange phase and charge can be realized using noninteracting electrons in a structured superconductor-2DEG setup, enabling potential quantum computing applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, experimentally feasible system to realize and manipulate anyons with fractional charge and exchange statistics in a weakly interacting electron system.

Findings

The system hosts anyons with exchange phase pi/4 and charge -e/2.

Vacancies in vortex lattices create bound states with fractional charge.

The setup enables manipulation of anyons for topological quantum computation.

Abstract

We describe a theoretical proposal for a system whose excitations are anyons with the exchange phase pi/4 and charge -e/2, but, remarkably, can be built by filling a set of single-particle states of essentially noninteracting electrons. The system consists of an artificially structured type-II superconducting film adjacent to a 2D electron gas in the integer quantum Hall regime with unit filling fraction. The proposal rests on the observation that a vacancy in an otherwise periodic vortex lattice in the superconductor creates a bound state in the 2DEG with total charge -e/2. A composite of this fractionally charged hole and the missing flux due to the vacancy behaves as an anyon. The proposed setup allows for manipulation of these anyons and could prove useful in various schemes for fault-tolerant topological quantum computation.