>"And other teams have probed a different property that makes anyons an intermediate between fermions and bosons. Fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle: no two fermions can ever occupy the same exact quantum state. But bosons have no such restrictions.
Anyons are in the middle — they do bunch, but not as much as bosons do, as an experiment described in April in Science reported [2]."
Instead of picking up a phase of -1 (like Fermions) or 1 (like Bosons), swapping Anyon's around has to be represented by a unitary operation which results in a superposition state (I don't fully understand this myself). The swapping unitary is universal for quantum computing. Hence proposals to use the "braiding" of anyons (re: shunting them around on guides) to build a quantum computer. They can in theory move around as much as they want and so long as they don't swap no operation is effectively performed. Hence they are thought to be a robust choice of qubit. Actually building them has proven very hard in practice. AFAIK most researchers think it is a dead end.
If I recall correctly, Microsoft has gone all-in on topological quantum computing as an alternative to the superconducting loops preferred by Google and IBM. I'm really hoping their work pans out, since it would mean a lot for our future abilities to create large error-corrected quantum circuits.
This is accurate. As far as I can tell, this work is akin to discovering the Josephson effect for superconducting qubits. Still a lot of work to be done to figure out how to braid anyons or build better anyons, etc.
TBH I didn’t even expect anyone to find them at all for another few decades, so this result is pretty cool.
Anyons are in the middle — they do bunch, but not as much as bosons do, as an experiment described in April in Science reported [2]."