![]() But the authors say that the particles’ behaviour satisfies the definition, and that for practical purposes they could still form a basis for quantum computing. Michael Manfra, an experimental physicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, says that although the results are impressive, the Quantinuum machine does not truly create nonabelions, but merely simulates some of their properties. “It’s really an amazing state of matter that we don’t have a very clear realization of in any other set-up.” “No two particles are taken around each other, but all together they are linked,” says Ashvin Vishwanath, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper. The appearance of the pattern was confirmed by measurements of the state of the ions during and after the operation, Dreyer says. The most conclusive one consisted of moving the excited states around to create virtual Borromean rings. To prove that the excited states were nonabelions, the team performed a series of tests. These correspond to the appearance of particles that should have the properties of nonabelions. But with further manipulation, the kagome can be put in excited states. The entangled states represented the lowest-energy states of a virtual 2D universe - essentially, the states that contain no particles at all. And by engineering those interactions, they created a virtual lattice of entanglement with the structure of a kagome - a pattern used in Japanese basket-weaving that resembles the repeated overlapping of six-pointed stars - folded to form a doughnut shape. The physicists exploited this flexibility to create an unusually complex form of quantum entanglement, in which all 32 ions share the same quantum state. Quantum computer race intensifies as alternative technology gains steam Quantinuum’s approach has an advantage: compared with most other types of qubit, the ions in its trap can be moved around and brought to interact with each other, which is how quantum computers perform computations. Each ion can encode a qubit, a unit of quantum computation that can be ‘0’ or ‘1’ like ordinary bits, but also a superposition of both states simultaneously. In the experiment, Henrik Dreyer, a physicist at Quantinuum’s office in Munich, Germany, and his collaborators used the company’s most advanced machine, called H2, which has a chip that can produce electric fields to trap 32 ions of the element ytterbium above its surface. “There is enormous mathematical beauty in this type of physical system, and it’s incredible to see them realized for the first time, after a long time,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK. Other researchers are less optimistic about the virtual nonabelions’ potential to revolutionize quantum computing, but creating them is seen as an achievement in itself. ![]() “This is the credible path to fault-tolerant quantum computing,” says Tony Uttley, Quantinuum’s president and chief operating officer. The results, revealed in a preprint on 9 May 1, were obtained on a machine at Quantinuum, a quantum-computing company in Broomfield, Colorado, that formed as the result of a merger between the quantum computing unit of Honeywell and a start-up firm based in Cambridge, UK. But their linking properties could help to make quantum computers less error-prone, or more ‘fault-tolerant’ - a key step to making them outperform even the best conventional computers. The exotic particles are called non-Abelian anyons, or nonabelions for short, and their Borromean rings exist only as information inside the quantum computer. Welcome anyons! Physicists find best evidence yet for long-sought 2D structures Researchers have used a quantum computer to create virtual particles and move them around so that their paths formed a Borromean-ring pattern. That same three-way linkage is an unmistakable signature of one of the most coveted phenomena in quantum physics - and it has now been observed for the first time. The coat of arms of Italy’s aristocratic House of Borromeo contains an unsettling symbol: an arrangement of three interlocking rings that cannot be pulled apart but doesn’t contain any linked pairs. If any one of the three rings is removed, the other two are no longer joined. ![]() Borromean rings depicted in a church in Florence, Italy. ![]()
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