Citation: de Propitius, Mark Wild, and F. Alexander Bais. "Discrete gauge theories." Particles and fields. New York, NY: Springer New York, 1999. 353-439.
Web: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9511201
Tags: Expository, Pedagogical, Physical, Conformal-field-theory, TQFT
This is an expository paper about gauge theories with finite groups. It talks about the corresponding braid group representations, the relationships to Hopf algebras and quantum doubles, and more. It is very pedagogical. It first deals with the abelian case Z_n, and then treats an explicit non-abelian case. It is not too long, and gives a great introduction to the physics relevant to topological quantum computation.
Note the date: this paper comes out before Kitaev's ideas. It is purely physical, and makes no reference to quantum computation.