Researchers demonstrated that braiding and fusing particles known as non-Abelian anyons can perform every operation required by a quantum computer. A quantum computer becomes broadly useful only when it can perform any computation rather than a limited set of specialized tasks. Physicists have now demonstrated that unusual quantum objects called non-Abelian anyons can provide that versatility by supporting the full range of operations required for universal quantum computing. Researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), Harvard, Stony Brook University and Quantinuum constructed and tested a complete computational toolkit based on non-Abelian anyons. Their experiments offer the first demonstration that this approach can support universal quantum operations. “We demonstrated a so-called universal gate set—meaning that if you store information in these emergent versions of quarks, and you move them around, you can do any quantum computation you might want to do,” said Ruben Verresen, assistant professor of molecular engineering at UChicago PME and a co-author of the new study published in Nature. The method could support both general-purpose quantum computing and more reliable machines. Quantum computers ordinarily protect information by distributing it across many physical qubits through error correction. However, those codes usually cannot perform every required operation directly on the protected information. Engineers often overcome that limitation with specially prepared resources called “magic states.” Producing them requires a demanding distillation process that can consume a substantial portion of a quantum computer’s available qubits. The findings indicate that non-Abelian anyons may provide a way around that expensive step. “Non-Abelian codes are a dark horse in the race to quantum error correction,” said Henrik Dreyer, managing director and scientific lead at Quantinuum’s Munich office and a co-author of the study. “In this work we show the first universal gate set in a non-Abelian code, which demonstrates