Fractional Statistics

In physics, an anyon is a type of quasiparticle that occurs only in two-dimensional systems, with properties much less restricted than the two kinds of standard elementary particles, fermions and bosons. In general, the operation of exchanging two identical particles, although it may cause a global phase shift, cannot affect observables. Anyons are generally classified as abelian or non-abelian. Abelian anyons (detected by two experiments in 2020) play a major role in the fractional quantum Hall effect. This is an active area of research; using a superconducting processor, Google Quantum AI reported on the first braiding of non-Abelian anyons in an arXiv article by Andersen et al. in October 2022, later published in Nature. In an arXiv article released in May 2023, Quantinuum reported on non-abelian braiding using a trapped-ion processor.