The world of quantum particles has its own "introverts" — anyons. They are unlike familiar electrons or protons. If you swap two such "introverts," they remember the maneuver, as if leaving an invisible trace. The most mysterious of them — non-Abelian anyons — have been sought for decades in thin layers of semiconductors at ultra-low temperatures. Now they have been assembled on an ordinary IBM quantum chip, like building blocks made of qubits.

The key surprise: the difficulty of preparation has been turned upside down. The ordinary fractional quantum Hall state (a liquid of electrons with fractional charge) requires a long chain of operations — the more particles, the longer the queue. Exotic cluster states, on the contrary, are prepared "fan-like" with parallel actions. Their depth (the number of steps in the circuit) does not grow with system size. On a chip with 156 qubits, as many as 18 different families of such states were assembled.

Measurements confirmed that the excitations have a fractional charge — exactly as theory predicts for these particles. For cluster states, the charge estimate was accurate in every measurement, without a single error. And with an interferometric scheme, it was possible to capture the "dance" of non-Abelian quasiparticles — their braided motion that changes the state of the whole system. This is a key step toward topologically protected quantum information, where data is stored not in individual qubits but in the "knot" of particle trajectories.

Thus, the quantum processor has become a microscope for matter that cannot be seen with ordinary means. And the most inaccessible turned out to be the most natural for this platform.