How to Spot Anyons

Quantum particles are either fermions or bosons, if they live in three dimensions. Confine them in two dimensions, and they can also be anything between the two types of particle—what Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, dubbed an anyon. While they are relatively simple to describe theoretically, anyons remain hard to spot in experiments. Now a quartet of researchers, including Wilczek himself, says that well-established spectroscopic techniques could provide a simple means to identify anyons. The proposal could help experimentalists discover systems that can host non-Abelian anyons, a class of anyons that is expected to be useful for fault-tolerant quantum computing.