A fabric that stretches lengthwise but not crosswise. That's roughly how a semi-Dirac material works: electrons can move freely in one direction but barely budge in the other. Because of this unusual anisotropy, special tracks, one-dimensional channels, emerge at the edges of the two-dimensional crystal. Electrons race along them only along the perimeter, like water in a trough.

When such a crystal is placed against an ordinary superconductor (a material that conducts electricity without resistance) and a magnetic field is switched on, Majorana bound states are born at the sample's corners — particles that are simultaneously their own antiparticles. They sit at the corners like four buttons and are immune to disturbances: to destroy them, you'd have to flip the entire system, not just give it a nudge. This robustness is what makes them candidates for ideal memory cells in a quantum computer.

The authors of the study showed that obtaining such particles doesn't require carving out ultra-thin wires or twisting magnetic vortices. Simply take a suitable semi-Dirac material and place a superconducting layer on top. Two edges of the crystal act as independent one-dimensional superconductors, and their corner junctions become traps for Majorana modes. This simplicity promises the rapid emergence of real devices based on such materials.