Bosonization for Fermions and Parafermions

Parafermions are fractional excitations which can be regarded as generalizations of Majorana bound states, but in contrast to the latter they require electron-electron interactions. Compared to Majorana bound states, they offer richer non-Abelian braiding statistics, and have thus been proposed as building blocks for topologically protected universal quantum computation. In this review, we provide a pedagogical introduction to the field of parafermion bound states in one-dimensional systems. We present the necessary theoretical tools for their study, in particular bosonization and the renormalization-group technique, and show how those can be applied to study parafermions.