Quantum walks with non-Abelian anyons

Phys Rev Lett. 2011 Jun 10;106(23):230404. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.230404. Epub 2011 Jun 10.

Abstract

We study the single particle dynamics of a mobile non-Abelian anyon hopping around many pinned anyons on a surface, by modeling it with a discrete time quantum walk. During the evolution, the spatial degree of freedom of the mobile anyon becomes entangled with the fusion degrees of freedom of the collective system. Each quantum trajectory makes a closed braid on the world lines of the particles establishing a direct connection between statistical dynamics and quantum link invariants. We find that asymptotically a mobile Ising model anyon becomes so entangled with its environment that its statistical dynamics reduces to a classical random walk with linear dispersion in contrast to particles with Abelian statistics which have quadratic dispersion.