ABSTRACT - DRUM - University of Maryland
ABSTRACT - DRUM - University of Maryland
ABSTRACT - DRUM - University of Maryland
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2. What are non-Abelian statistics?<br />
3. How is a non-Abelian superconductor related to quantum computation?<br />
1.1 Topological Phases: An Overview<br />
The 1980 discovery <strong>of</strong> Integer Quantum Hall Effect [1] opened the door to<br />
the fascinating world <strong>of</strong> topological phases in condensed matter systems. The remarkably<br />
precise quantization <strong>of</strong> Hall conductance, insensitive to many microscopic<br />
details such as disorder and geometry, is the first example <strong>of</strong> the “universal”, exact<br />
features common in topological phases, that are robust against any small perturbations<br />
to the system. The even more striking discovery <strong>of</strong> fractional quantum Hall<br />
effect [2] led to the conceptual formulation <strong>of</strong> the notion <strong>of</strong> topological order [3].<br />
To understand its meaning, let us take a grand view <strong>of</strong> gapped quantum phases.<br />
In one sentence, topological order can be regarded as a “periodic table” <strong>of</strong> all gapped<br />
phases.<br />
Well-known examples <strong>of</strong> gapped phases are insulators: band insulators,<br />
Mott insulators, etc. All the excitations in these phases are gapped so correlation<br />
functions <strong>of</strong> any local observables decay exponentially in the limit <strong>of</strong> large space-time<br />
separation. However, it does not mean that they are all alike: IQH states, albeit<br />
gapped, have quantized Hall conductance while ordinary band insulators do not.<br />
Therefore a more refined notion <strong>of</strong> the equivalence classes between gapped quantum<br />
phases is needed, which is provided by the concept <strong>of</strong> adiabatic continuity [4]. Two<br />
gapped quantum phases are said to be adiabatically connected, if there exists a<br />
parameter path to connect their Hamiltonians such that the spectral gap is not<br />
2