Topological basis

Anticlockwise rotation
Clockwise rotation
Exchange of two particles in 2 + 1 spacetime by rotation. The rotations are
inequivalent, since one cannot be deformed into the other (without the worldlines
leaving the plane, an impossibility in 2d space).

In more than two dimensions, the spin–statistics theorem states that any
multiparticle state of indistinguishable particles has to obey either Bose–Einstein
or Fermi–Dirac statistics. For any d > 2, the Lie groups SO(d,1) (which generalizes
the Lorentz group) and Poincaré(d,1) have Z2 as their first homotopy group. Because
the cyclic group Z2 is composed of two elements, only two possibilities remain.
(The details are more involved than that, but this is the crucial point.)

The situation changes in two dimensions. Here the first homotopy group of SO(2,1),
and also Poincaré(2,1), is Z (infinite cyclic). This means that Spin(2,1) is not
the universal cover: it is not simply connected. In detail, there are projective
representations of the special orthogonal group SO(2,1) which do not arise from
linear representations of SO(2,1), or of its double cover, the spin group
Spin(2,1). Anyons are evenly complementary representations of spin polarization by
a charged particle.

This concept also applies to nonrelativistic systems. The relevant part here is
that the spatial rotation group SO(2) has an infinite first homotopy group.

This fact is also related to the braid groups well known in knot theory. The
relation can be understood when one considers the fact that in two dimensions the
group of permutations of two particles is no longer the symmetric group S2 (with
two elements) but rather the braid group B2 (with an infinite number of elements).
The essential point is that one braid can wind around the other one, an operation
that can be performed infinitely often, and clockwise as well as counterclockwise.

A very different approach to the stability-decoherence problem in quantum computing

is to create a topological quantum computer with anyons, quasi-particles used as
threads and relying on braid theory to form stable logic gates.[