Thermal anyon interferometry in phonon-coupled Kitaev spin liquids
ORAL
Abstract
Recent theoretical studies inspired by experiments on the Kitaev magnet α-RuCl3 highlight the nontrivial impact of phonons on the thermal Hall conductivity of chiral topological phases. Here we introduce mixed mesoscopic-macroscopic devices that allow refined thermal-transport probes of non-Abelian spin liquids with Ising topological order. These devices feature a quantum-coherent mesoscopic region with quantized or negligible phonon conductance, flanked by macroscopic lobes that facilitate efficient thermalization between chiral Majorana edge modes and bulk phonons. We show that our devices enable (i) accurate determination of the quantized thermal Hall conductivity, (ii) identification of non-Abelian Ising anyons via the temperature dependence of the thermal conductance, and most interestingly (iii) single-anyon detection through heat-based anyon interferometry. Analogous results apply broadly to phonon-coupled chiral topological orders.
*This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center. We acknowledge additional support from the Army Research Office under Grant Award W911NF17-1-0323; the National Science Foundation through Grant DMR-1723367; the 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 Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech; and a Simons Investigatorship.
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Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05869
Presenters
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Kai Klocke
- University of California, Berkeley