The Z k -parafermion Hall state is an incompressible fluid of k-electron clusters generalizing the Pfaffian state of paired electrons. Extending our earlier analysis of the Pfaffian, we introduce two "parent" abelian Hall states which reduce to the parafermion state by projecting out some neutral degrees of freedom. The first abelian state is a generalized (331) state which describes clustering of k distinguishable electrons and reproduces the parafermion state upon symmetrization over the electron coordinates. This description yields simple expressions for the quasi-particle wave functions of the parafermion state. The second abelian state is realized by a conformal theory with a (2k −1)-dimensional chiral charge lattice and it reduces to the Z k -parafermion state via the coset construction su(k) 1 ⊕ su(k) 1 / su(k) 2 . The detailed study of this construction provides us a complete account of the excitations of the parafermion Hall state, including the field identifications, the Z k symmetry and the partition function.

The wave functions of the Haldane-Rezayi paired Hall state have been previously described by a non-unitary conformal field theory with central charge c = −2. Moreover, a relation with the c = 1 unitary Weyl fermion has been suggested. We construct the complete unitary theory and show that it consistently describes the edge excitations of the Haldane-Rezayi state. Actually, we show that the unitary (c = 1) and non-unitary (c = −2) theories are related by a local map between the two sets of fields and by a suitable change of conjugation. The unitary theory of the Haldane-Rezayi state is found to be the same as that of the 331 paired Hall state. Furthermore, the analysis of modular invariant partition functions shows that no alternative unitary descriptions are possible for the Haldane-Rezayi state within the class of rational conformal field theories with abelian current algebra. Finally, the known c = 3/2 conformal theory of the Pfaffian state is also obtained from the 331 theory by a reduction of degrees of freedom which can be physically realized in the double-layer Hall systems.

We extend the topological quantum computation scheme using the Pfaffian quantum Hall state, which has been recently proposed by Das Sarma et al., in a way that might potentially allow for the topologically protected construction of a universal set of quantum gates. We construct, for the first time, a topologically protected Controlled-NOT gate which is entirely based on quasihole braidings of Pfaffian qubits. All single-qubit gates, except for the π/8 gate, are also explicitly implemented by quasihole braidings. Instead of the π/8 gate we try to construct a topologically protected Toffoli gate, in terms of the Controlled-phase gate and CNOT or by a braid-group based Controlled-Controlled-Z precursor. We also give a topologically protected realization of the Bravyi-Kitaev two-qubit gate g 3 .

We review the topological quantum computation scheme of Das Sarma et al. from the perspective of the conformal field theory for the two-dimensional critical Ising model. This scheme originally used the monodromy properties of the non-Abelian excitations in the Pfaffian quantum Hall state to construct elementary qubits and execute logical NOT on them. We extend the scheme of Das Sarma et al. by exploiting the explicit braiding transformations for the Pfaffian wave functions containing 4 and 6 quasiholes to implement, for the first time in this context, the single-qubit Hadamard and phase gates and the two-qubit Controlled-NOT gate over Pfaffian qubits in a topologically protected way. In more detail, we explicitly construct the unitary representations of the braid groups B 4 , B 6 and B 8 and use the elementary braid matrices to implement one-, two-and three-qubit gates. We also propose to construct a topologically protected Toffoli gate, in terms of a braid-group based Controlled-Controlled-Z gate precursor. Finally we discuss some difficulties arising in the embedding of the Clifford gates and address several important questions about topological quantum computation in general.

We give a general proof for the existence and realizability of Clifford gates in the Ising topological quantum computer. We show that all quantum gates that can be implemented by braiding of Ising anyons are Clifford gates. We find that the braiding gates for two qubits exhaust the entire two-qubit Clifford group. Analyzing the structure of the Clifford group for n ≥ 3 qubits we prove that the the image of the braid group is a non-trivial subgroup of the Clifford group so that not all Clifford gates could be implemented by braiding in the Ising topological quantum computation scheme. We also point out which Clifford gates cannot in general be realized by braiding.