An Anyon Primer

We present an exact scheme of bosonization for anyons (including fermions) in the two-dimensional manifold of the quantum Hall fluid. This gives every fractional quantum Hall phase of the electrons one or more dual bosonic descriptions. For interacting electrons, the statistical transmutation from anyons to bosons allows us to explicitly derive the microscopic statistical interaction between the anyons, in the form of the effective two-body and few-body interactions. This als...

Anyons are exotic low-dimensional quasiparticles whose unconventional quantum statistics extends the binary particle division into fermions and bosons. The fractional quantum Hall regime provides a natural host, with first convincing anyon signatures recently observed through interferometry and cross-correlations of colliding beams. However, the fractional regime is rife with experimental complications, such as an anomalous tunneling density of states, which impede the manipu...

In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose dispatched a manuscript introducing the concept now known as Bose statistics to Albert Einstein. Bose could hardly have imagined that the exotic statistics of certain emergent particles of quantum matter would one day suggest a route to fault-tolerant quantum computation. This non-technical Commentary on "anyons," namely particles whose statistics is intermediate between Bose and Fermi, aims to convey the underlying concept as well as its experime...

Strongly interacting topologically ordered many-body systems consisting of fermions or bosons can host exotic quasiparticles with anyonic statistics. This raises the question whether many-body systems of anyons can also form anyonic quasiparticles. Here, we show that one can, indeed, construct many-anyon wavefunctions with anyonic quasiparticles. The braiding statistics of the emergent anyons are different from those of the original anyons. We investigate hole type and partic...

Although the mathematics of anyon condensation in topological phases has been studied intensively in recent years, a proof of its physical existence is tantamount to constructing an effective Hamiltonian theory. In this paper, we concretely establish the physical foundation of anyon condensation by building the effective Hamiltonian and the Hilbert space, in which we explicitly construct the vacuum of the condensed phase as the coherent states that are the eigenstates of the ...

I give a non-technical account of fractional statistics in one dimension. In systems with periodic boundary conditions, the crossing of anyons is always uni-directional, and the fractional phase $\theta$ acquired by the anyons gives rise to fractional shifts in the spacings of the relative momenta, ${\Delta p =2\pi\hbar/L\, (|\theta|/\pi+n)}$. The fractional shift $\theta/\pi$ is a good quantum number of interacting anyons, even though the single particle momenta, and hence t...

A model-independent formulation of anyons as spinning particles is presented. The general properties of the classical theory of (2+1)-dimensional relativistic fractional spin particles and some properties of their quantum theory are investigated. The relationship between all the known approaches to anyons as spinning particles is established. Some widespread misleading notions on the general properties of (2+1)-dimensional anyons are removed.

We review aspects of classical and quantum mechanics of many anyons confined in an oscillator potential. The quantum mechanics of many anyons is complicated due to the occurrence of multivalued wavefunctions. Nevertheless there exists, for arbitrary number of anyons, a subset of exact solutions which may be interpreted as the breathing modes or equivalently collective modes of the full system. Choosing the three-anyon system as an example, we also discuss the anatomy of the s...

We discuss how to construct models of interacting anyons by generalizing quantum spin Hamiltonians to anyonic degrees of freedom. The simplest interactions energetically favor pairs of anyons to fuse into the trivial ("identity") channel, similar to the quantum Heisenberg model favoring pairs of spins to form spin singlets. We present an introduction to the theory of anyons and discuss in detail how basis sets and matrix representations of the interaction terms can be obtaine...

We develop a density functional treatment of non-interacting abelian anyons, which is capable, in principle, of dealing with a system of a large number of anyons in an external potential. Comparison with exact results for few particles shows that the model captures the behavior qualitatively and semi-quantitatively, especially in the vicinity of the fermionic statistics. We then study anyons with statistics parameter $1+1/n$, which are thought to condense into a superconducti...