Time-domain anyon interferometry in Kitaev honeycomb spin liquids and beyond

ORAL

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on the Kitaev honeycomb magnet α-RuCl3, we introduce time-domain probes of the edge and quasiparticle content of non-Abelian spin liquids. Our scheme exploits ancillary quantum spins that communicate via time-dependent tunneling of energy into and out of the spin liquid's chiral Majorana edge state. We show that the ancillary-spin dynamics reveals the edge-state velocity and, in suitable geometries, detects individual non-Abelian anyons and emergent fermions via a time-domain counterpart of quantum-Hall anyon interferometry. We anticipate applications to a wide variety of topological phases in solid-state and cold-atoms settings.

*Army Research Office under Grant Award W911NF17-1-0323; NSF grants DMR-1723367 and DMR-1848336; Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF1250; the Harvard-MIT CUA, ARO Grant W911NF-20-1-0163; the AFOSR-MURI Photonic Quantum Matter award FA95501610323; and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. The final stage of this work was in part supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science through the Quantum Science Center, a National Quantum Information Science Research Center.

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Presenters

  • Kai Klocke

    • University of California, Berkeley

Authors

  • Kai Klocke

    • University of California, Berkeley

  • David Aasen

    • Microsoft / UCSB
    • University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Roger Mong

    • University of Pittsburgh
    • Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pittsburgh

  • Eugene Demler

    • Harvard University
    • Department of Physics, Harvard University

  • Jason F. Alicea

    • Caltech
    • Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology
    • Department of Physics and Institute for Quantum Information and Matter; Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, California Institute of Technology