Christina Knapp '13, UC Santa Barbara

The field of condensed matter physics studies how systems containing many electrons and atoms organize into phases of matter.  Familiar phases of matter, such as liquids and solids, can be identified by looking at a local region of the system and determining what symmetries the system has.  For instance, a liquid is translationally invariant, but a solid will obey some crystal symmetry.  Remarkably, not all phases of matter can be characterized by their symmetries: at low temperatures in a highly-entangled system, a system can form a topological phase of matter that cannot be identified by any local probe of the system.  These topological phases have many exotic properties, including quantized experimental signatures that are robust to local environmental noise and disorder, and emergent quasiparticles that carry fractionalized electric charge or spin.  Furthermore, topological phases are a promising platform for building a quantum computer that is insensitive to local environmental noise, in essence, using error correction at the hardware level.  In this talk, I will give an introduction to topological phases of matter and how they can be used in topological quantum computing.  I will then describe current progress towards building a topological quantum computer.