A modified interferometer to measure anyonic braiding statistics
A major advance in the study of topological quantum phases of matter has been achieved through the first direct measurements of the fractional braiding statistics of the quasi-particles in the fractional quantum Hall effect using various quantum Hall interferometers. However, since these measurements effectively detect the phase accrued as one quasi-particle encircles an integer number of others, they measure twice the braiding phase, e^i2ø, of Abelian anyons; one particle encircling another is topologically equivalent to two exchanges of the same handedness. Among other things, this means that these interferometers could not distinguish bosons (ø= 0) from fermions (ø= ÃÂ). I will discuss our proposal for a slightly more complex version of an interferometer that would directly measure e^iø.
Bio: Chaitanya Murthy received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2011 and an M.S. in nanoengineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2014. He then resolved to be a theoretical physicist and received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020 under the guidance of Prof. Mark Srednicki and Prof. Chetan Nayak. After a Moore postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, where he was mentored by Prof. Steven Kivelson, Chaitanya joined the University of Rochester in 2024 as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Murthy’s research is in the general field of theoretical condensed matter physics. Topics of interest range from the equilibrium and transport properties of strongly correlated matter to quantum chaos and thermalization.