science

The original paper is called “Excitons in the fractional quantum Hall effect”

If you know what that means, it’s more clear and less misleading than the phys.org headline.

If you don’t know what that means, it’s a novel combination of two known properties of materials—excitons and the fqhe.

The buzz appears to be that it leads to some weird excitations/quasiparticles that have non-bosonic statistics. Namely, anyons and fermionic excitations can appear (the former is a known phenomenon, but the latter has only been theorized—a fact that honestly surprised me). This loosely relates to some types of quantum computers, but in all honesty, I would expect this paper to only be interesting to those in condensed matter physics, and I’m not entirely sure why it was picked up and turned into a thing.