The chip is powered by the world’s first topoconductor, which can create a new state of matter that is not a solid, liquid, or gas – making it possible to design quantum systems that fit in a single chip smaller than the palm of a hand, and to create more reliable hardware, a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature reports.
Paul Stevenson, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said Microsoft could be “very serious competitors” in the race to build the first reliable quantum computers if the company successfully built on this research.
“The new papers are a significant step, but as with much promising work in quantum computing, the next steps are difficult and until the next steps have been achieved, it is too soon to be anything more than cautiously optimistic,” he said.
“These topological qubits protect the information they carry by using the properties of a new type of emergent particle, a Majorana fermion, which means that it is harder for this information to be lost as it is processed. However, [there is an] added layer of complexity when constructing these qubits when compared to competing architectures,” he said.
These Majorana particles had never previously been seen or made. Microsoft said they had to be “coaxed into existence with magnetic fields and superconductors”, which is why most quantum computing research has focused on other approaches.
Oh hey, I remember reading about this a couple of years ago and wondering if they'd manage to get it working in scale! Last I checked, they were still in the "research" phase of "R&D" and, as I...
Oh hey, I remember reading about this a couple of years ago and wondering if they'd manage to get it working in scale! Last I checked, they were still in the "research" phase of "R&D" and, as I recall, they were struggling with generating qubits It's definitely not a very straightforward idea, as mentioned, but the idea of using topological quasi-particles definitely has merits.
I'm honestly fairly optimistic about them managing to reach their end goal successfully, although topological qubits are definitely above my undergrad-level knowledge in this field of physics, meaning that I can't very reliably comment on the very technical stuff. Still, I would expect a lot of setbacks along the way, so I'd be very skeptical about the 2033 "deadline"... But then again, probably so do they.
Oh hey, I remember reading about this a couple of years ago and wondering if they'd manage to get it working in scale! Last I checked, they were still in the "research" phase of "R&D" and, as I recall, they were struggling with generating qubits It's definitely not a very straightforward idea, as mentioned, but the idea of using topological quasi-particles definitely has merits.
I'm honestly fairly optimistic about them managing to reach their end goal successfully, although topological qubits are definitely above my undergrad-level knowledge in this field of physics, meaning that I can't very reliably comment on the very technical stuff. Still, I would expect a lot of setbacks along the way, so I'd be very skeptical about the 2033 "deadline"... But then again, probably so do they.