2025/03/28 by Xu Yang, Yang, Xu, Ryan Buechele +3 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum many-body systems #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.22792
openalex publication_date 2025/03/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We show that the braiding of anyons in a quantum spin liquid leaves a distinct dynamical signature in the nonlinear pump-probe response. Using a combination of exact diagonalization and matrix product state techniques, we study the nonlinear pump-probe response of the toric code in a magnetic field, a model which hosts mobile electric e and magnetic m anyonic excitations. While the linear response signal oscillates and decays with time like ∼ t-1.3, the amplitude of the nonlinear signal for χ(3)XZZ features a linear-in-time enhancement at early times. The comparison between χ(3)XZZ, which involves the non-trivial braiding of e and m anyons, and χ(3)XXX that involves the trivial braiding of the same types of anyons, serves to distinguish the braiding statistics of anyons. We support our analysis by constructing a hard-core anyon model with statistical gauge fields to develop further insights into the time dependence of the pump-probe response. Pump-probe spectroscopy provides a distinctive new probe of quantum spin liquid states, beyond the inconclusive broad features observed in single spin flip inelastic neutron scattering.