Understand
The emergence of non-Abelian anyons from large collections of interacting elementary particles is a conceptually beautiful phenomenon with important ramifications for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
- Over the last few decades the field has evolved from a highly theoretical subject to an active experimental area, particularly following proposals for trapping non-Abelian anyons in `engineered' structures built from well-understood components.
- In this short overview we briefly tour the impressive progress that has taken place in the quest for the simplest type of non-Abelian anyon---defects binding Majorana zero modes---and then turn to similar strategies for pursuing more exotic excitations.
- Specifically, we describe how interfacing simple quantum Hall systems with conventional superconductors yields `parafermionic' generalizations of Majorana modes and even Fibonacci anyons---the latter enabling fully fault tolerant universal quantum computation.