Researchers from four universities including Peking University and Xi’an Jiaotong University claimed a new method realizing non-Abelian braiding, by constructing Jackiw-Rebbi zero-modes in a quantum spin Hall insulator.
Topological quantum computation has been drawing extensive attention in quantum computing for fault-tolerance properties. Topological quantum computation is based on the non-Abelian braiding of quantum states, where the non-Abelian braiding in the field of quantum statistics is highly related to the non-locality of the quantum states. The exploration on topological quantum computation in the last two decades is mainly focused on the Majorana fermion (or its zero-energy incarnation known as Majorana zero-mode), an exotic particle possessing non-Abelian statistics and well-known for its anti-particle being itself.
Jackiw-Rebbi zero-mode was adopted to refer to the topologically protected zero-mode in the boundary of topological insulators. In contrast with the Majorana zero-mode only presented with a non-vanishing superconducting order parameter, Jackiw-Rebbi zero-mode is not self-conjugate and therefore could be presented even in the absence of particle-hole symmetry.
The research article has been published in National Science Review. (Science China Press)