Long-sought particle that could revolutionize quantum computing

I'm not a condensed matter researcher, but from what I know these particular majorana fermions are quasiparticles, so it's a little misleading to directly compare this to the Higgs boson which is an elementary particle. Still, this is cool because it means topological quantum computing might be possible:

http://stationq.cnsi.ucsb.edu/~freedman/Publications/96.pdf

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=154238

For a classical analogy, compare an asynchronous analogue circuit designed to evaluate a specific equation to a clocked digital circuit that evaluates that same equation. The analogue circuit will orders of magnitude simpler, but it will be extremely difficult to incorporate it into a much larger circuit because fluctuations in heat, etc. will change when output is produced as well as potentially changing the result. Clocked digital gates allow for more deterministic output to arrive at a known time, thus allowing far greater complexity.

Currently, quantum computing is just barely at the simple analogue circuit level (e.g. D-Wave). Fault tolerance is crucial for scaling up quantum computing devices towards more complex algorithms and, eventually, being able to execute stored programs. Fault tolerant protocols typically operate by redundantly encoding a single qubit's worth of data in several physical qubits. How many physical qubits are required depends greatly on the reliability of the physical qubits used. Thus, the complexity of a quantum computer is massively dependent on finding reliable physical qubits, like majorana fermions could prove to be!