Laboratoire de Physique Théorique
Toulouse - UMR 5152

The experimental progress (e.g. on strongly spin-orbit coupled nano-wires deposited on a superconductor) in establishing the existence of non-abelian particles is very exciting and is the first step in utilizing topological phases of matter for e.g. topological quantum computing.

We construct models of interacting itinerant non-Abelian anyons moving along one-dimensional chains, focusing, in particular, on itinerant Ising anyon chains, and derive effective anyonic t-J models for the low-energy sectors. Solving these models by exact diagonalization, we find a fractionalization of the anyons into charge and (non-Abelian) anyonic degrees of freedom—a generalization of spin-charge separation of electrons which occurs in Luttinger liquids. A detailed description of the excitation spectrum by combining spectra for charge and anyonic sectors requires a subtle coupling between charge and anyonic excitations at the microscopic level (which we also find to be present in Luttinger liquids), despite the macroscopic fractionalization.