Non-Abelian braiding of Fibonacci anyons with a superconducting processor

Abstract: Non-Abelian topological orders offer an intriguing path towards fault-tolerant quantum computation, where information can be encoded and manipulated in a topologically protected manner immune to arbitrary local noises and perturbations. However, realizing non-Abelian topologically ordered states is notoriously challenging in both condensed matter and programmable quantum systems, and it was not until recently that signatures of non-Abelian statistics were observed through digital quantum simulation approaches. Despite these exciting progresses, none of them has demonstrated the appropriate type of topological orders and associated non-Abelian anyons whose braidings alone support universal quantum computation. Here, we report the realization of non-Abelian topologically ordered states of the Fibonacci string-net model and demonstrate braidings of Fibonacci anyons featuring universal computational power, with a superconducting quantum processor. We exploit efficient quantum circuits to prepare the desired states and verify their nontrivial topological nature by measuring the topological entanglement entropy. In addition, we create two pairs of Fibonacci anyons and demonstrate their fusion rule and non-Abelian braiding statistics by applying unitary gates on the underlying physical qubits. Our results establish a versatile digital approach to exploring exotic non-Abelian topological states and their associated braiding statistics with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors.