Date: Friday, November 22, 2013
Time: 11:00
Place: HIT E 41.1
Abstract
Matter occurs in various phases with different properties. Usually these phases are characterized in terms of symmetry breaking. A major discovery in the 1980s was the quantum Hall effect which forms a new kind of "topological" order that cannot be understood in terms of symmetry breaking. One of the characterizing features of topological order is the presence of exotic "anyonic" excitations which can have an exchange statistics different from bosons or fermions. First, I will present methods to extract characterizing properties of topological order directly from the ground state wave-functions using infinite matrix product state methods. Second, I will discuss how so-called symmetry enriched topologically ordered phases can be characterized by calculating non-local order parameter.