English

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

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2009-05-05 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Superconductivity

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0812.3140,
  title  = {Creation and manipulation of anyons in a layered superconductor-2DEG system},
  author = {G. Rosenberg and B. Seradjeh and C. Weeks and M. Franz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0812.3140},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

18 pages, 10 figures, submitted to PRB; (v2) section on experimental signatures added, references updated