Aharonov-Bohm effect in the non-Abelian quantum Hall fluid

Abstract

The nu=5/2 fractional quantum Hall effect state has attracted great interest recently, both as an arena to explore the physics of non-Abelian quasiparticle excitations, and as a possible architecture for topological quantum information processing. Here we use the conformal field theoretic description of the Moore-Read state to provide clear tunneling signatures of this state in an Aharonov-Bohm geometry. While not probing statistics directly, the measurements proposed here would provide a first, experimentally tractable step towards a full characterization of the 5/2 state.