Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Fractionalization in Mesoscopic Rings

Smitha Vishveshwara

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

A spectacular phenomenon that can occur in strongly correlated low dimensional systems is that of
fractionalization. In such electronic systems, quasiparticles excitations can carry a fraction of
the electron’s charge and can have anyonic quantum statistics which is neither fermionic nor bosonic.
Here, mesoscopic ring geometries are introduced as a means of bringing out novel signatures of both
charge fractionalization and 'non-Abelian statistics'. It is shown that power maps of quasiparticle
motion around a thin ring can act as measures of fractionalization complementary to recent
cutting-edge studies in etched quantum wires. A proposal is presented for probing the non-Abelian
statistics of recent tour de force realizations of fractional vortices in superconducting mesoscopic rings.