2008

Collective States of Interacting Anyons, Edge States, and the Nucleation of Topological Liquids

Gils, Charlotte, Ardonne, Eddy, Trebst, Simon et al.

Understand

Quantum mechanical systems, whose degrees of freedom are so-called su(2)_k anyons, form a bridge between ordinary SU(2) spin systems and systems of interacting non-Abelian anyons.

  • Such a connection can be made for arbitrary spin-S systems, and we explicitly discuss spin-1/2 and spin-1 systems.
  • Anyonic spin-1/2 chains exhibit a topological protection mechanism that stabilizes their gapless ground states and which vanishes only in the limit (k to infinity) of the ordinary spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain.
  • For anyonic spin-1 chains we find their phase diagrams to closely mirror the one of the biquadratic SU(2) spin-1 chain.

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