Observing anyonization of bosons in a quantum gas.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40425811.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41586-025-09016-9 and PMC identifier 12137132.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Anyons<sup>1,2</sup> are low-dimensional quasiparticles that obey fractional statistics, hence interpolating between bosons and fermions. In two dimensions, they exist as elementary excitations of fractional quantum Hall states<sup>3-5</sup> and are believed to enable topological quantum computing<sup>6,7</sup>. One-dimensional anyons have been theoretically proposed, but their experimental realization has proven to be difficult. Here we observed emergent anyonic correlations in a one-dimensional strongly interacting quantum gas, resulting from the phenomenon of spin-charge separation<sup>8-10</sup>. A mobile impurity provides the necessary spin degree of freedom to engineer anyonic correlations in the charge sector and simultaneously acts as a probe to reveal these correlations. Starting with bosons, we tune the statistical phase to transmute bosons through anyons to fermions and observe an asymmetric momentum distribution<sup>11-14</sup>, a hallmark of anyonic correlations. Going beyond equilibrium conditions, we observed dynamical fermionization of the anyons<sup>15</sup>. This study opens the door to the exploration of non-equilibrium anyonic phenomena in a highly controllable setting<sup>15-17</sup>.