It's anyon's game: the race to quantum computation

In 1924, Satyendra Nath Bose dispatched a manuscript introducing the concept now known as Bose statistics to Albert Einstein. Bose could hardly have imagined that the exotic statistics of certain emergent particles of quantum matter would one day suggest a route to fault-tolerant quantum computation. This non-technical Commentary on "anyons," namely particles whose statistics is intermediate between Bose and Fermi, aims to convey the underlying concept as well as its experimental manifestations to the uninitiated.