Fluxonium Qubits: The Future of Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing?

Physicists at Cornell University, in collaboration with Google Quantum AI, have successfully demonstrated a simple model containing non-Abelian anyons, exotic particles that could be used for error correction in quantum computing. The particles can only exist in two dimensions, but the researchers have developed a "recipe" for computing with them that can be executed on modern quantum hardware. The particles protect bits of quantum information by storing them non-locally, and the protocol allows for computing with these bits. This is a step towards implementing fault-tolerant quantum computing in the real world.