Guest Speaker

Professor Woowon Kang

From the James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, the University of Chicago

https://physics.uchicago.edu/people/profile/woowon-kang/

Abstract

In two spatial dimensions quantum mechanical particles are not limited to being bosons or fermions but can become particles known as anyons. Anyons come in two major flavors: Abelian and non-Abelian. Non-Abelian anyons have received considerable interest in recent years as a possible platform to realize topologically protected qubit. The enigmatic even-denominator fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) state at filling of n = 5/2 is postulated to be the most likely candidate for harboring non-Abelian anyons. However, detection of the postulated non-Abelian anyons has been shown to be notoriously difficult. In this talk I will present our recent experimental study of quantum interference experiments of the n = 5/2 FQHE state in the Aharonov-Bohm regime. We observe unambiguous signatures in the interference measurements that support the likely existence of non-Abelian anyons in the n = 5/2 FQHE state.