[zmgsabst]

> Personally, I find it curious that people talk about detecting single photons, but in these fractional charge experiments, nobody mentions detecting a single quasiparticle.

You detect a single photon when it perturbs an apparatus like a photon multiplier; you detect a single quasiparticle when it perturbs a split stream of electrons.

The apparent difference is that photons can travel through free space and strike such an apparatus from afar; while quasiparticles definitionally cannot. However, I’ve read about experiments that measure a single anyon on a dot by wrapping electron interferometry around it, which is measuring the lone quasiparticle on that dot.

So I don’t follow your point.

[gradschoolfail]

Thank you for keeping me on my feet!

You probably mean the following (note the nuance and date of the first one):

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.12139.pdf

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-1019-1

I still think my point, originally about 1 electron split into 2 locations, or “ends” of string (but devolving to a complaint about casual ignorance of the central issue in publications) hasn’t been completely destroyed, because here you are measuring interference of 2 anyons, somewhat like measuring the interference of a photon “with itself” in a double split experiment.

The broader point could be that the effect of a single photon is “localized”, but here to see the effect, you have to move 1 anyon in a “complete path” around the other, recalling the Feynman/Dirac belt in my top level comment, a trick I said an adult should try to correct me with :)