The Quantum Hall Effect, Non-Abelian Anyons, and Topological Quantum Computation Chetan Nayak, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Station Q and Professor of Physics, UCSB

Electrons have remarkable collective properties, including the ability to organize themselves into topological phases. In such phases, the low-energy states of the system have the emergent property of insensitivity to everything except the topology of the system. Topological phases occur in the quantum Hall regime and may occur in other correlated electronic materials. In addition to their fundamental interest as new states of matter, they have potential applications to quantum computing. In this talk, I will discuss the possibility that a new type of quantum particles, non-Abelian anyons, are realized in a topological phase in the quantum Hall regime and some ideas about how the discovery of such particles could pave the way to fault-tolerant quantum computing.