Physics (Internal)

Braiding and Entanglement in Non-Abelian Quantum Hall States

This event is part of the Biophysics/Condensed Matter Seminar Series.

Abstract: Fractional quantum Hall states exhibit a unique kind of quantum order known as topological order. Certain of these states may have a sufficiently rich form of topological order (i.e., they may be “non-Abelian”) to be used for so-called topological quantum computation, an intrinsically fault tolerant form of quantum computation which is carried out by “braiding” the world lines of quasiparticle excitations in 2+1 dimensional space time. In this talk I will review the properties of non-Abelian quantum Hall states and discuss some of the methods we have found for finding specific braiding patterns which can be used to carry out universal quantum computation with them. I will also discuss recent work, both analytic and numerical, on one-dimensional chains of “interacting” non-Abelian quasiparticles.