Description:

Title: More Surprises on the Edges: exotic edge phases and domain walls in fractional quantum Hall states

Speaker: Dr. Meng Cheng, Microsoft Station Q, Santa Barbara CA

Abstract: Topological quantum phases often exhibit stable gapless edge excitations, which provide an invaluable window to experimentally probe and manipulate topological degrees of freedom. In the talk I will show how these edge states can be exploited to realize new edge phases and domain walls that are otherwise difficult to find. I will demonstrate that by tuning interactions on the edge, unconventional stable chiral edge phases bounding the same bulk topological state can arise, for example in the IQH states at filling fraction \nu=8. and discuss their experimental signatures. These unexpected phenomena demonstrates the subtle “one-to-many” feature of the bulk-boundary correspondence. Furthermore, interfaces between different edge phases can lead to exotic zero modes localized on the domain walls, which may have applications to topological quantum information processing. Two examples will be discussed: (1) topologically protected Majorana zero modes occurring on the edge of a \nu=8 IQH state without superconductivity. (2) parafermionic zero modes on the edge of Laughlin FQH states

Speaker Schedule

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, CMP