Science and Engineering

University of California, Santa Barbara

Nonabelian states of matter in two dimensional systems host emergent excitations with fundamentally different quantum statistics than those found in our three-dimensional world.  A young investigator at the University of California, Santa Barbara proposes to build and deploy a scanning probe tool—the Ultra-Low Temperature Magneto-Thermal Microscope (ULT-MTM)—designed to facilitate discovery of nonabelian ground states.  The new instrument integrates an ultra-sensitive scanning superconducting sensor in a superfluid helium-4 immersion cell, providing nanoscale thermal and magnetic imaging at millikelvin temperatures.  The ULT-MTM probe will be used to find signatures of nonabelian order in van der Waals heterostructures, consisting of layered stacks of atomically thin two-dimensional materials in which a wide variety of promising candidate states have been identified.  These experiments will provide unprecedentedly detailed information about the microscopic structure of many-body quantum states, while paving the way for breakthroughs in quantum information science that harness the long-predicted decoherence protection of quantum bits based on braiding of nonabelian quasiparticles.