The tiny glitches in your TV screen actually act just like the exotic particles we need to build quantum computers.
April 2, 2026
Original Paper
Braiding and exchange statistics of liquid crystalline Majorana quasiparticles
arXiv · 2604.00492
The Takeaway
Usually, these complex quantum particles require extreme cold or exotic materials to exist. This study shows that the messy defects in common liquid crystals follow the same 'braiding' rules, potentially offering a way to perform quantum calculations at room temperature using soft matter.
From the abstract
Liquid crystalline defects in 3D can be viewed as geometric spinors, whose emergent properties are reminiscent of those of topological excitations in quantum condensed matter, such as Majorana quasiparticles. However, it is unclear how deep this analogy is, and whether this is a purely mathematical mapping, or it extends to key physical features, such as the exchange statistics or braiding behaviour. To address this question, here we consider a simple pattern made up of four nematic Majorana-lik