Special Condensed Matter Seminar: Dave Aasen, Caltech - “Fermion condensation and superconducting string-nets”

Event time: 
Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Location: 
Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL), 52 See map
217 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

A great deal of progress has been made toward a classification of bosonic topological orders whose microscopic constituents are bosons. Much less is known about the classification of their fermionic counterparts. In this talk I will describe a systematic way of producing fermionic topological orders using the technique of fermion condensation. Roughly, this can be understood as binding a physical fermion to an emergent fermion and condensing the pair. I will discuss the `super pivotal categories’ that describe universal properties of these phases and use them to construct exactly solvable string-net models. These string-net models feature conventional anyons and two flavours of vortices. I will show that one of the vortex types is similar to a vortex in a p+ip superconductor binding a Majorana zero mode, and will mention some possible applications.