Statistics of Fractionalized Excitations through Threshold Spectroscopy

We show that neutral anyonic excitations have a signature in spectroscopic measurements of materials: The low-energy onset of spectral functions near the threshold follows universal power laws with an exponent that depends only on the statistics of the anyons. This provides a route, using experiment...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Morampudi, Siddhardh C., Turner, Ari M., Pollmann, Frank, Wilczek, Frank
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Published: American Physical Society (APS) 2018
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/117774
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6489-6155
Description
Summary:We show that neutral anyonic excitations have a signature in spectroscopic measurements of materials: The low-energy onset of spectral functions near the threshold follows universal power laws with an exponent that depends only on the statistics of the anyons. This provides a route, using experimental techniques such as neutron scattering and tunneling spectroscopy, for detecting anyonic statistics in topologically ordered states such as gapped quantum spin liquids and hypothesized fractional Chern insulators. Our calculations also explain some recent theoretical results in spin systems.