Speaker
Description
A basic tenet of quantum mechanics is that all elementary particles are either bosons or fermions. Ensembles of bosons and fermions may act differently due to differences in their underlying statistical properties. For example, much of the electronic structure of ordinary solids may be explained by symmetry and noting electrons are fermions and obey the Pauli exclusion principle – fermions cannot exist in the same quantum state simultaneously. On the other hand, integral spin atoms and photons are bosons and are not constrained by the Pauli principle. Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity are some of the most spectacular properties of bosons. Starting in the early 1980’s it was theoretically conjectured that excitations that are neither bosons nor fermions may exist under special conditions in two dimensional systems. These unusual excitations were dubbed “anyons” by Frank Wilczek. Anyons may have fractional charge and fractional statistics, however directly probing these properties presents experimental challenges. My lectures will focus on experiments that demonstrate fractional statistics have observable consequences for the two-dimensional electron gas in the fractional quantum Hall regime. While theory indicated the necessity of anyons from the earliest days of the fractional quantum Hall effect, experimental verification has required many advances in materials, experimental probes, and understanding of the operation of electronic Fabry-Perot interferometers in the quantum Hall regime in real devices. I hope to describe how these challenges were met through the work of many groups over the last few decades and outline the physics that remains to be explored in future generations of experiments.
