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Scientists and engineers have announced a significant advancement in developing fault-tolerant qubits for quantum computing. In a pair of articles, they report that, in experiments with flakes of semiconductor materials — each only a single layer of atoms thick — they detected signatures of ‘fractional quantum anomalous Hall’ (FQAH) states. The team’s discoveries mark a first and promising step in constructing a type of fault-tolerant qubit because FQAH states can host anyons — strange ‘quasiparticles’ that have only a fraction of an electron’s charge. Some types of anyons can be used to make what are called ‘topologically protected’ qubits, which are stable against any small, local disturbances.