Braiding and Entanglement in Nonabelian Quantum Hall States

Certain fractional quantum Hall states, including the experimentally observed ν = 5/2 state, and, possibly, the ν = 12/5 state, may have a sufficiently rich form of topological order (i.e. they may be nonabelian) to be used for topological quantum computation, an intrinsically fault tolerant form of quantum computation which is carried out by braiding the world lines of quasiparticle excitations in 2+1 dimensional space time. Here we briefly review the relevant properties of nonabelian quantum Hall states and discuss some of the methods we have found for finding specific braiding patterns which can be used to carry out universal quantum computation using them. Recent work on one-dimensional chains of interacting quasiparticles in nonabelian states is also reviewed.