Anyon braiding and telegraph noise in a graphene interferometer
Thomas Werkmeister, James R. Ehrets, Marie E. Wesson, Danial Haei Najafabadi, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Bertrand I. Halperin, Amir Yacoby, Philip Kim
Abstract
The search for anyons, quasiparticles with fractional charge and exotic exchange statistics, has inspired decades of condensed matter research. Quantum Hall interferometers enable direct observation of the anyon braiding phase through discrete interference phase jumps when the number of encircled localized quasiparticles changes. In this study, we observed this braiding phase in both the filling factor 1/3 and 4/3 fractional quantum Hall states by probing three-state random telegraph noise (RTN) in real time. We found that the observed RTN stems from anyon quasiparticle number n fluctuations, and we reconstructed three Aharonov-Bohm oscillation signals phase shifted by 2π/3, corresponding to the three possible interference branches from braiding around n (mod 3) anyons. Our methods can be readily extended to interference of non-abelian anyons.