Weizmann team finds strong evidence of 'memory particles' for robust quantum computing

Physicists at the Weizmann Institute of Science reported in Nature on 7 January 2026 some of the strongest evidence yet for non-Abelian anyons, exotic quasiparticles that in effect remember the order in which they have been swapped around one another. The experiment was carried out in the laboratory of Dr. Yuval Ronen, led by Dr. Jehyun Kim and Himanshu Dev, with theorists Professor Ady Stern and Professor David Mross and with ultra-pure crystals supplied by Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of Japan's National Institute for Materials Science.

Anyons can arise only in two-dimensional materials placed in strong magnetic fields, where electrons act together so that the resulting particles carry a fraction of an electron's charge. The team worked with bilayer graphene, two stacked sheets of carbon one atom thick, and built an electronic interferometer, a circuit modelled on the classic optical set-up in which light bounces between two mirrors. Waves of charge travelled around a small island in the circuit, and the resulting interference pattern revealed what they were carrying.

The researchers measured a fractional charge with an even denominator, half the charge of an electron, circling the island, which they interpret as two non-Abelian anyons moving together. By changing the number of particles trapped inside the island, they found that those particles carried a quarter of an electron's charge, again consistent with theoretical predictions for non-Abelian states. They were also able to follow individual anyons entering the island in time. The team stresses that the anyons have not yet been separated and swapped directly, which will be the next step.

Non-Abelian anyons are at the heart of so-called topological quantum computing. Because information would be stored in the collective state of several such particles rather than in any single one, it should be naturally protected from the noise that plagues today's quantum processors.