Charles Reynolds Distinguished Lecture Series

Its discovery three decades ago, the phenomenon of the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) has inspired a variety of emergent particles characterized by their unusual braidings. It was appreciated quite early on that the FQHE may provide a realization of particles that obey fractional braid statistics, namely anyons, which interpolate between bosons and fermions. Subsequently, it was proposed that electrons capture vortices to form composite fermions that experience an effective magnetic field. An even more bizarre class of particles, termed Majorana particles, was later envisioned in the context of the 5/2 FQHE; these constitute an example of nonabelian anyons. This talk will review the essential properties and the scope of these particles, and present the current status of experimental evidence for them. It will also discuss a recent theoretical proposal in which a complex pairing of excited composite fermions can possibly result in FQHE at 3/8, which may also support nonabelian quasiparticles.