Researchers have directly observed the optical Magnus effect for the first time, revealing a tiny shift in laser interactions that could affect the precise control of qubits in quantum computers. Anyone who has watched a spinning soccer ball curve around a defensive wall has seen what happens when spin changes an object’s path through the [...]

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 [...]