Introduction to Abelian and Non-Abelian Anyons
Introduction to abelian and non-abelian anyons Sumathi Rao Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Chhatnag Road, Jhusi, Allahabad 211 019, India. In this set of lectures, we will start with a brief pedagogical introduction to abelian anyons and their properties. This will essentially cover the background material with an introduction to basic concepts in anyon physics, fractional statistics, braid groups and abelian anyons. The next topic that we will study is a specific exactly solvable model, called the toric code model, whose excitations have (mutual) anyon statistics. Then we will go on to discuss non-abelian anyons, where we will use the one dimensional Kitaev model as a prototypical example to produce Majorana modes at the edge. We will then explicitly derive the non-abelian unitary matrices under exchange of these Majorana modes. PACS numbers: I. INTRODUCTION The first question that one needs to answer is why we are interested in anyons1. Well, they are new kinds of excitations which go beyond the usual fermionic or bosonic modes of excitations, so in that sense they are like new toys to play with! But it is not just that they are theoretical constructs - in fact, quasi-particle excitations have been seen in the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems, which seem to obey these new kind of statistics2. Also, in the last decade or so, it has been realised that if particles obeying non-abelian statistics could be created, they would play an extremely important role in quantum computation3. So in the current scenario, it is clear that understanding the basic notion of exchange statistics is extremely important.
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