Thermal interferometry of anyons
Zezhu Wei, Navketan Batra, V. F. Mitrović, D. E. Feldman
Abstract
Anyonic interferometry probes the braiding phases of excitations in topologically ordered matter. This technique is well established for charged quasiparticles in the fractional quantum Hall effect. We propose to extend it to neutral anyons, such as Ising anyons in Kitaev magnets and quasiparticles in other neutral spin liquids. We find that the thermal current through an interferometer is sensitive to the statistics of tunneling quasiparticles. We present a systematic investigation of signatures of various Abelian and non-Abelian topological orders in Fabry-P\'erot and Mach-Zehnder interferometers. The heat current through a Fabry-P\'erot device is different for different topological orders and depends on the topological charge inside the interferometer. A Mach-Zehnder device shows interference in topologically trivial systems only. For a nontrivial statistics, the heat current reduces to the sum of the contributions from two constrictions in the interferometer. Furthermore, we identify another probe of topological order that involves the scaling of the thermal current through a single tunneling contact at low temperatures. The current shows a universal temperature dependence, sensitive to the topological order in the system.