Thursday, November 3, 2016

Anyons II

I always thought that the most serious criticism of "anyons in the microtubule" was that it would require internal electromagnetic fields of a strength that isn't there. But it turns out that, in the past decade, we've moved beyond the quantum Hall effect as the sole paradigm of topological states; and now there are ideas for how to create them, without needing an ambient magnetic field. (Chiral spin liquids, in particular, may be the key.) So the new edition of Sumathi Rao's anyon primer is welcome.