TY - JOUR T1 - Anyonic interferometry and protected memories in atomic spin lattices JF - Nature Physics Y1 - 2008 A1 - Liang Jiang A1 - Gavin K. Brennen A1 - Alexey V. Gorshkov A1 - Klemens Hammerer A1 - Mohammad Hafezi A1 - Eugene Demler A1 - Mikhail D. Lukin A1 - Peter Zoller AB - Strongly correlated quantum systems can exhibit exotic behavior called topological order which is characterized by non-local correlations that depend on the system topology. Such systems can exhibit remarkable phenomena such as quasi-particles with anyonic statistics and have been proposed as candidates for naturally fault-tolerant quantum computation. Despite these remarkable properties, anyons have never been observed in nature directly. Here we describe how to unambiguously detect and characterize such states in recently proposed spin lattice realizations using ultra-cold atoms or molecules trapped in an optical lattice. We propose an experimentally feasible technique to access non-local degrees of freedom by performing global operations on trapped spins mediated by an optical cavity mode. We show how to reliably read and write topologically protected quantum memory using an atomic or photonic qubit. Furthermore, our technique can be used to probe statistics and dynamics of anyonic excitations. VL - 4 U4 - 482 - 488 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1365v1 CP - 6 J1 - Nat Phys U5 - 10.1038/nphys943 ER -