Exotic form of matter with potential for quantum computing

New work suggests the ability to create fractionalized electrons known as non-Abelian anyons without a magnetic field, opening new possibilities for basic research and future applications – MIT

MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today.

The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that host electrons that can split into fractions of themselves but, importantly, can do so without the application of a magnetic field. 

The general phenomenon of electron fractionalization was first discovered in 1982 and resulted in a Nobel Prize. That work, however, required the application of a magnetic field. The ability to create the fractionalized electrons without a magnetic field opens new possibilities for basic research and makes the materials hosting them more useful for applications.

When electrons split into fractions of themselves, those fractions are known as anyons. Anyons come in variety of flavors, or classes. The anyons discovered in the 2023 materials are known as Abelian anyons. Now, in a paper reported in the Oct. 17 issue of Physical Review Letters, the MIT team notes that it should be possible to create the most exotic class of anyons, non-Abelian anyons.

“Non-Abelian anyons have the bewildering capacity of ‘remembering’ their spacetime trajectories; this memory effect can be useful for quantum computing,” says Liang Fu, a professor in MIT’s Department of Physics and leader of the work. 

Fu further notes that “the 2023 experiments on electron fractionalization greatly exceeded theoretical expectations. My takeaway is that we theorists should be bolder.”

Fu is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory. His colleagues on the current work are graduate students Aidan P. Reddy and Nisarga Paul, and postdoc Ahmed Abouelkomsan, all of the MIT Department of Phsyics. Reddy and Paul are co-first authors of the Physical Review Letters paper.