Topological Insulating Phases of Non-Abelian Anyonic Chains

Boundary conformal field theory is brought to bear on the study of topological insulating phases of non-abelian anyonic chains. These topologically non-trivial phases display protected anyonic end modes. We consider antiferromagnetically coupled spin-1/2 su(2)$_k$ chains at any level $k$, focusing on the most prominent examples; the case $k = 2$ describes Ising anyons (equivalent to Majorana fermions) and $k = 3$ corresponds to Fibonacci anyons. We prove that the braiding of these emergent anyons exhibits the same braiding behavior as the physical quasiparticles. These results suggest a `solid-state' topological quantum computation scheme in which the emergent anyons are braided by simply tuning couplings of non-Abelian quasiparticles in a fixed network.