Session S3 - Non-abelian States in Quantum Systems.
INVITED session, Wednesday afternoon, March 24
518AC, Palais des Congres
The quasiparticle excitations of the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) system have been predicted to have fractional charge and statistics, and measurements for detecting fractional charge have been proposed and employed with success. Here, inspired by the Hanbury-Brown Twiss experiment, which revealed the bosonic statistics of photons some decades ago, a set-up is proposed for measuring fractional statistics in the FQH system. In this set-up it is shown, explicitly for Laughlin states, that edge-state quasiparticle current-current correlation measurements from two sources into two sinks can carry signatures of both fractional charge and fractional statistics. In addition, the consequences of such measurements for fractional states that cannot be described by Laughlin wavefunctions are discussed.