
Anyons: Physicists find best evidence yet for long-sought 2D structures - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01988-0
======
peter_d_sherman
>"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]."

~~~
IIAOPSW
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.

------
3PS
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.

~~~
Whirl
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.

------
blackrock
Flatlanders?

~~~
bencollier49
It reminds me of the holographic entities in Greg Egan's "Diaspora".

