Breakthroughs in quantum computing using non-standard quanta

Question

It seems that quantum computers can be classified by the type of quantum they operate on. Not entirely sure what category most common current systems fall into (eg. D-Wave, Google, IBM, Microsoft). Photonic computing seems to be one of the more 'popular' alternative methods. Curious about other forms of unconventional quantum computing.

Quasi interested in a few different cases:

• Phonon - sound based

• Roton - vortex based

• Dropleton - quantum droplet*

• Fracton - fractal analog of phonons*

• Plasmon - plasma based

Also curious about chronons & virtual particles.

Have significant breakthroughs in quantum computing been made using non-standard quanta?

Answer 1

The only two quasi-particle quanta for which I know there to be active research in quantum computing are phonons and anyons.

• Phonons: That state-of-the-art is given my answer here: Phononic Quantum Computing

• Anyons: Synthesizing the first anyonic qubit is still an outstanding goal, but major milestones have been discussed very recently. This paper was the topic of an article with the very promising title "Topological qubits arriving in 2018?"

Answer 2

I'm not sure if you count adiabatic quantum computing as fringe, but there was a paper using 4 NMR qubits to implement a adiabatic analogue to HHL which allowed them to invert an 8x8 operator with 98.4% fidelity which got put on arXiv a couple weeks ago. I thought that was pretty neat.