Louis H Kauffman
University of Illinois, USA
Title: Braiding of majorana fermions and topological quantum computation
Biography
Biography: Louis H Kauffman
Abstract
Majorana fermions are Fermionic particles that are their own anti-particles. Mathematically, a standard fermion such as an electron can be seen as a composite of two Majorana fermions. At the level of operators in quantum field theory this is seen by writing F = a + ib where F is the fermion annihilation operator and a and b are elements of a Clifford algebra where a^2 = b^2 = 1 and ab = -ba. Then F* = a - ib and we have FF = F*F* = 0 and FF* + F*F is a scalar, the usual fermion relations. Remarkably, rows of electrons in nanowires have been shown to have correlation behaviors that corresponds to this decomposition, and topologically remarkable is the fact that the underlying Majorana fermions have a natural braiding structure. This talk will discuss the braiding structure of Majorana fermions and possible applications to topological quantum computing