Anne Nielsen

Anyons as detector of topology and phase transitions in 2D systems, fractal dimensions, and quasicrystals

Systems consisting of a large number of interacting bosons or fermions in two dimensions can in some situations form anyonic quasiparticles that are neither bosons, nor fermions. Such systems are topologically ordered, and they have many special properties. They are, for instance, not characterized by a local order parameter, which makes it challenging to detect the phases.

Here, we demonstrate that anyons are an interesting tool to detect topological order in new types of systems and to detect phase transitions involving topological phases. The phase transitions are detected based on the idea that the system does not support the same types of quasiparticles on the two sides of the transition. We test the method on three rather different examples, and in all cases we find that it is sufficient to study a simple property of the anyons, requiring low numerical costs, to accurately detect the phase transition point. A further advantage of the method is that it does not require particular boundary conditions, and we utilize this to demonstrate that topological order can also occur in fractal dimensions and on quasicrystals.

References: arXiv:1909.02046, arXiv:1907.03193, PRB 101, 115413 (2020).