Partitioning of Diluted Anyons Reveals their Braiding Statistics

June-Young M. Lee, Changki Hong, Tomer Alkalay, Noam Schiller, Vladimir Umansky, Moty Heiblum, Yuval Oreg, H. -S. Sim

Published 2022-09-30Version 1

Correlations of partitioned particles carry essential information about their quantumness. Partitioning full beams of charged particles leads to current fluctuations, with their autocorrelation (AC, shot noise) revealing the particle's charge. This is not the case when the partitioned particle beams are diluted. Bosons or fermions will exhibit particles antibunching (due to their discreteness). However, when partitioning anyons, such as the quasiparticles in fractional quantum Hall states (FQH), the AC unveils an essential aspect of their exchange statistics: their 'braiding phase'. Here, we describe detailed measurements of partitioning diluted anyonic edge modes of the FQH 1/3-state. The measured excess AC agrees with our theory of braiding in the 'time-domain' - with a braiding angle of 2{\theta}=2{\pi}/3 - without any fitting parameters. Our work offers a relatively straightforward and simple method to observe the braiding statistics of other exotic states, such as non-abelian states, without resorting to complex interference experiments.