#  Universal Gates from Braiding and Fusing Anyons on Quantum Hardware 

 





July 21, 2026

 

 

   ![abstract image of braided anyons](/sites/g/files/omnuum6476/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/2026-07/braided_anyons-news.jpg?itok=NZIp74vB) 

 

A quantum computer requires the ability to store and manipulate information globally to protect against local noise. Topologically ordered phases offer two routes: encoding information in the ground-state subspace or in anyonic excitations. The toric code exemplifies the first approach but does not intrinsically support a universal gate set. The latter—topological quantum computation—implements gates by braiding non-Abelian anyons around each other. However, the simplest non-Abelian generalizations of the toric code cannot achieve universality by braiding alone.

In a new article in *Nature*, a team of scientists from Harvard, Quantinuum, University of Chicago, and Stony Brook University demonstrated that anyon fusion, used as a computational primitive, renders these minimally non-Abelian topologically ordered states universal. They prepared a 54-qubit ground state of the quantum double of *S*3, the smallest non-Abelian group, on the H2 processor of Quantinuum and encoded logical information in the global fusion space of non-Abelian anyons. By combining braiding with fusion, they realized a universal topological gate set and read-out, which they demonstrated by topologically preparing a magic state and thus showing that the *S*3 topologically ordered state is scalably preparable, yet rich enough to support a universal gate set. More broadly, this work opens up new pathways for harnessing the intrinsic properties of quantum matter to manipulate quantum information.

Read the article: Lo, C.F.B., Lyons, A., Gresh, D. *et al.,* "Universal gates from braiding and fusing anyons on quantum hardware," *Nature* **655**, 591–597 (2026). <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10709-y>

Also see "[Braided, exotic particles could build reliable, universal quantum computers](https://phys.org/news/2026-07-braided-exotic-particles-reliable-universal.html)," by Sarah C.P. Williams (U Chicago) on phys.org.