5th March 2021 at 14:15: Manohar Kumar

Our second Physics Colloquium for this spring will take place on Friday, March 5th. We will have a presentation to be given by Manohar Kumar, whose recent work in the field of quantum physics was featured on the front cover of Science. In this colloquium, titled Mystery particle anyons finally revealed their identity in a particle collider, Manohar will talk about the discovery of the nature of anyons.

Manohar Kumar obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 2012, and is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Physics at Aalto University. His research interests include quantum transport, quantum devices and technologies and electron quantum optics, and his current work focuses on graphene.

The event will be held on Friday 05.03.21 at 14:15, on Zoom (Meeting ID:  637 7087 6002 – Passcode: 753457).

Here is the abstract:

Two-dimensional systems at low temperatures and the high magnetic field can host exotic particles with elementary excitations carrying fractional charge e* = e/q such as in fractional quantum Hall effect. These exotic particles are anyonic particles, whose quantum statistics are neither bosonic nor fermionic; instead, they are predicted to obey fractional statistics. The fractional charge of these anyons has been studied successfully using low frequency shot noise measurement. However, a clear sign of the fractional statistics remains elusive. We probed the fractional statistics and the fractional charge of anyons in mesoscopic anyonic collider. Here we collided two independent anyonic excitations at a beam splitter and measured the correlation in the noise fluctuations of outgoing beam currents. Our collision results explicitly extract the quantum phase of Φ = π/3 for the exchange of two anyonic quasiparticles with q = e/3. This is the very first smoking gun result on fractional statistics of anyon. This collider geometry could be extended to perform the ultimate braiding experiment to the realized full potential of a special kind of anyon called non-Abelian anyons in topological quantum computation.