Description
- Abstract:
- Topological phases of matter have recently attracted intense interest. Among topological phases, topological quantum liquids, such as fractional quantum Hall liquids and gapped quantum spin liquids, possess exotic excitations with fractional statistics, known as anyons. They are of great interest to quantum information science. The most direct method to probe anyonic statistics involves electronic interferometers, which have proven successful in fractional quantum Hall liquids very recently. This thesis gives a comprehensive description of the interferometery technique and explains how electronic interferometers can be adapted to thermal interferometry that can probe the non-Abelian anyonic statistics of charge-neutral excitations in Kitaev spin liquids. We compare the Fabry–Pérot geometry and the Mach–Zehnder geometry and identify unique signatures of Ising statistics in Kitaev spin liquids. Furthermore, the idea of thermal interferometry can be generalized to probe almost any Abelian or non-Abelian anyonic statistics in topological liquids. In general, the absence of interference current in a Mach–Zehnder device is a smoking-gun evidence of non-trivial anyonic statistics. This thesis also addresses the problem of electronic quantum Hall interferometers with multiple edge channels, explaining how a closed inner edge channel affects the measured I–V curve at a finite source-drain bias voltage. When the inner mode is completely reflected and the outer mode is partially transmitted, we find striking features at low temperatures related to the resonance of excitations of the closed inner channel. However, these features disappear rapidly with increasing temperature. Another feature brought by the closed inner channel is the exponential decay in the I–V curve at a high bias, which is due to the fluctuations of the quasiparticle number on the inner channel.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2024
Citation
Wei, Zezhu,
"Interferometry in Topological Quantum Liquids"
(2024).
Physics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:d83hv4dv/
