Talk:Anyon
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The use of Spin(2,1) as notation here seems not to be consistent with that at spinor.
Charles Matthews 09:19, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)
- Spin(p,q) is really the double cover of SO(p,q), not its universal cover in general... Of course, for Spin(3,1) and Spin(3), it makes no difference. Phys 13:25, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)
[edit] Too technical
Can we get some kind of introduction for lay people? I'm a physics major and I still can't make head or tail of this. Where is this thing on the scale from real to hypothetical? —Keenan Pepper 05:53, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
- I can say that anyon-related phenomena are observed in solid state physics, so they're real. You might say the article is too technical, but I would say that this article is just not very good, which might explain why it's difficult to understand. Here's how I think of it: the universal cover of a circle (which is the rotation group in 2d) is the whole real line, and representations of the real line are just real numbers. Compare with the rotation group in 3d, whose universal cover is compact (it's a 3 sphere). Compact groups have discrete representations, so spin is discrete. The universal cover is actually only a double cover, so it takes half-integer values. The really interesting bit is how the action of interchange of 2d particles is path-dependent; particle exchange is a representation of the braid group in 2d, rather than just the symmetric group as in higher d. I dunno, if those rambling sentences will be of any use to you. It would be nice to have a good article on this, I'll put it on my list, but the list has been getting long, so I can't promise anything soon. -lethe talk + 06:25, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
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- I don't understand this either. I think someone needs to take a couple of steps back at the start of the article to explain the context. 81.19.57.146 12:08, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
