Abstract
Correlations of partitioned particles carry essential information about their quantumness1. Partitioning full beams of charged particles leads to current fluctuations, with their autocorrelation (namely, shot noise) revealing the particles’ charge2,3. This is not the case when a highly diluted beam is partitioned. Bosons or fermions will exhibit particle antibunching (owing to their sparsity and discreteness)4,5,6. However, when diluted anyons, such as quasiparticles in fractional quantum Hall states, are partitioned in a narrow constriction, their autocorrelation reveals an essential aspect of their quantum exchange statistics: their braiding phase7. Here we describe detailed measurements of weakly partitioned, highly diluted, one-dimension-like edge modes of the one-third filling fractional quantum Hall state. The measured autocorrelation agrees with our theory of braiding anyons in the time domain (instead of braiding in space); with a braiding phase of 2θ = 2π/3, without any fitting parameters. Our work offers a relatively straightforward and simple method to observe the braiding statistics of exotic anyonic states, such as non-abelian states8, without resorting to complex interference experiments9.
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Source data are provided with this paper. All other data related to this paper are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
J.-Y.M.L. acknowledges support from Korea NRF, NRF-2019-Global PhD fellowship. H.-S.S. acknowledges support from Korea NRF, the SRC Center for Quantum Coherence in Condensed Matter (grant number 2016R1A5A1008184 and RS-2023-00207732). N.S. acknowledges discussions with Y. Shapira and A. Stern, and acknowledges the Clore Scholars Programme. Y.O. acknowledges the partially supported by grants from the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreements LEGOTOP No. 788715 and HQMAT No. 817799), the DFG (CRC/Transregio 183, EI 519/7-1), the BSF and NSF (2018643), and the ISF Quantum Science and Technology (2074/19). M.H. acknowledges the continuous support of the Sub-Micron Center staff, the support of the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC under grant agreement number 713351. We thank G. Fève, F. Pierre and C. Mora for discussions.
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J.-Y.M.L. and H.-S.S. developed the theory and analysed the data. C.H. and T.A. fabricated the structures, did all measurements and analysed the data. N.S. and Y.O. added perspective on the theory. V.U. designed and grew the heterostructures by Molecular Beam Epitaxy. M.H. supervised the experiments.
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This file contains Supplementary Information, including Supplementary Notes I–VI, Figs. 1–13 and Refs. 1–13.
Supplementary Video 1
Time-domain interference. This video illustrates the time-domain braiding process in our experiment.
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Source data for Supplementary Figs. 2–4 and 11–13.
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Lee, JY.M., Hong, C., Alkalay, T. et al. Partitioning of diluted anyons reveals their braiding statistics. Nature 617, 277–281 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05883-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05883-2
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