A team of mathematicians and physicists in the US has discovered a way to exploit a previously neglected aspect of topological quantum field theory, revealing that these states can be much more broadly useful for quantum computation than previously believed. The quantum bits in topological quantum computers are based on particle-like knots, or vortices, in the sea of electrons washing through a material. The advantage of anyon-based quantum computing is that the only thing that can change the state of anyons is moving them around in relation to each other – a process called “braiding” that alters their relative topology. However, not all anyons are up to the task. In the semisimple model, braiding the remaining anyons, known as Ising anyons, only lends itself to a limited range of computational logic gates, which can be efficiently simulated by classical computers, which reduces their usefulness for truly ground-breaking quantum machines. The team solved this problem with ingenious workarounds created by Lauda’s PhD student, Filippo Iulianelli, allowing the computational space to only those regions where anyon transformations work out as unitary.