Abstract
Recent theoretical studies inspired by experiments on the Kitaev magnet α-RuCl3 highlight the nontrivial impact of phonons on the thermal Hall conductivity of chiral topological phases. Here, we introduce mixed mesoscopic-macroscopic devices that allow refined thermal-transport probes of non-Abelian spin liquids with Ising topological order. These devices feature a quantum-coherent region with quantized or negligible phonon conductance, flanked by macroscopic lobes that facilitate efficient thermalization between chiral Majorana edge modes and bulk phonons. We show that our devices enable (i) accurate determination of the quantized thermal Hall conductivity, (ii) identification of non-Abelian Ising anyons via the temperature dependence of the thermal conductance, and, most interestingly, (iii) single-anyon detection through heat-based anyon interferometry. Analogous results apply broadly to phonon-coupled chiral topological orders.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 011034 |
| Journal | Physical Review X |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2022 |
Funding
We thank Arnab Banerjee, Dima Feldman, Erik Henriksen, Chengyun Hua, Michael Manfra, Alan Tennant, and Zezhu Wei for helpful discussions. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Quantum Science Center. J. A. additionally acknowledges support from the Army Research Office under Grant No. W911NF17- 1-0323; the National Science Foundation through Grant No. DMR-1723367; the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant No. GBMF1250; and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. J. E. M. acknowledges additional support from a Simons Investigatorship. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter | |
| National Quantum Information Science Research Centers | |
| Quantum Science Center | |
| National Science Foundation | DMR-1723367 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Army Research Office | W911NF17- 1-0323 |
| Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation | GBMF1250 |
| Office of Science | |
| Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |