“As pure science, it’s just, wow,” said Ady Stern, a condensed matter theorist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who has spent his career studying the objects. Together, the experiments flex the growing muscle of quantum devices while offering a potential glimpse into the future of computing: By maintaining nearly indestructible records of their journeys through space and time, non-abelian anyons could offer the most promising platform for building error-tolerant quantum computers. Their work follows a preprint posted last fall in which researchers with Google celebrated the first clear intertwining of non-abelian objects, a proof of concept that information can be stored and manipulated in their shared memory. Physicists working with the company Quantinuum announced today that they had used the company’s newly unveiled, next-generation H2 processor to synthesize and manipulate non-abelian anyons in a novel phase of quantum matter. “This has been a target, and now it’s hit,” Wilczek said. Now two landmark experiments have finally succeeded, and no one is laughing. Researchers have spent millions of dollars over the past three decades or so trying to capture and tame the particlelike objects, which go by the cryptic moniker of non-abelian anyons. “I said, ‘Come on, Tony, people are going to make fun of us,’” said Wilczek, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, seeing no reason that nature should allow such strange beasts to exist, the future Nobel prize-winning physicist chose not to follow his thought experiments to their most outlandish conclusions - despite the objections of his collaborator Anthony Zee, a renowned theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Had he put pen to paper and done the calculations, Wilczek would have found that these then-theoretical particles held an otherworldly memory of their past, one woven too thoroughly into the fabric of reality for any one disturbance to erase it. Forty years ago, Frank Wilczek was mulling over a bizarre type of particle that could live only in a flat universe.
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