Non-Abelian braiding of phonons from first principles

ORAL

Abstract

Non-Abelian braiding of quasiparticles can encode information immune from environmental noise with the potential to realize topological quantum computation. Here we propose that phonons, a bosonic excitation of lattice vibrations, can carry non-Abelian charges in their band structures that can be braided using external stimuli. Taking some earthly abundant materials such as silicates and aluminium oxide as representative examples, we demonstrate that an external electric field or electrostatic doping can give rise to phonon band inversions that induce the redistribution of non-Abelian charges, leading to non-Abelian braiding of phonons. We show that phonons can be a primary platform to study non-Abelian braiding in the reciprocal space, and we expand the toolset to study such braiding processes.

*B.P., R.-J.S., and B.M. acknowledge funding from the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability. R.-J. S. also acknowledges funding from the Marie Sk lodowska-Curie programme under EC Grant No. 842901 and from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. B.M. also acknowledges support from the Gianna Angelopoulos Programme for Science, Technology, and Innovation. The calculations were performed using resources provided by the Cambridge Tier-2 system, operated by the University of Cambridge Research Computing Service (www.hpc.cam.ac.uk) and funded by EPSRC Tier-2 capital grant EP/P020259/1, as well as with computational support from the U.K. Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub, which is partially funded by EPSRC (EP/P020194), for which access is obtained via the UKCP consortium and funded by EPSRC grant ref. EP/P022561/1

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Publication: B Peng*, A Bouhon* (*Contributed Equally), B Monserrat and R-J Slager. Non-Abelian braiding of phonons in layered silicates. arXiv: 2105.08733

Presenters

  • Bo Peng

    • Univ of Cambridge

Authors

  • Bo Peng

    • Univ of Cambridge