Tuesday, January 1, 2013

1212.6395 (Parsa Bonderson et al.)

Quasi-Topological Phases of Matter and Topological Protection    [PDF]

Parsa Bonderson, Chetan Nayak
We discuss systems which have some, but not all of the hallmarks of topological phases. These systems' topological character is not fully captured by a local order parameter, but they are also not fully described at low energies by topological quantum field theories. For such systems, we formulate the concepts of quasi-topological phases (to be contrasted with true topological phases), and symmetry-protected quasi-topological phases. We describe examples of systems in each class and discuss the implications for topological protection of information and operations. We explain why topological phases and quasi-topological phases have greater stability than is sometimes appreciated. In the examples that we discuss, we focus on Ising-type (a.k.a. Majorana) systems particularly relevant to recent theoretical advances and experimental efforts.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6395

No comments:

Post a Comment