This week, Microsoft announced<\/a> that it had made a major breakthrough in achieving that goal, stating that they created a quantum architecture\u2014known as Majorana 1\u2014that\u2019s capable of one day hosting one million qubits on a single chip. To achieve this technological breakthrough, the company decided years ago to, in a sense, go back to the basics. Instead of using qubits found in other quantum computers<\/a>, Microsoft engineers set out to create what\u2019s known as a \u201ctopological qubit\u201d\u2014a different approach to creating a qubit that theoretically should make them more stable, and therefore scalable. <\/p>\n Related Story<\/p>\n To do this, Microsoft uses what\u2019s known as a Majorana quasiparticle<\/a>. True to their name, Majoranas aren\u2019t really particles, but are instead special patterns that arise under certain conditions. This new architecture\u2014which Microsoft calls the Topological Core powered by \u201ctopoconductors\u201d\u2014can coax into existence (using nanowires, superconductors, and lots of fancy physics) a Majorana zero mode state that\u2019s inherently stable. It\u2019s also small, which is a big deal if you want to keep quantum computers from reaching warehouse-level dimensions. A new paper published in the journal Nature<\/a> showed that they could measure the two different states within a qubit. <\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve designed a chip that\u2019s able to measure the presence of Majorana, and Majorana allows us to create a topological qubit,\u201d Microsoft technical fellow Krysta Svore detailed in a video about Majorana 1<\/a>. \u201cA topological qubit is reliable, small, and controllable. This solves the noise problem that creates errors in qubits<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently, Majorana 1 holds only eight of these qubits, which isn\u2019t nearly enough to perform world-changing calculations<\/a>. But Microsoft argues that the architecture is in place to eventually scale the number of topological qubits up to one million\u2014a feat that, if true, would surely usher in the age of quantum computing. <\/p>\n Related Story<\/p>\n However, some scientists remain skeptical of Microsoft\u2019s claims. For one, a paper hasn\u2019t yet been published about its topological qubit claims for peers in the field to analyze. And secondly, many impurities can create conditions that look like Majorana quasiparticles, but are not. \u201cThe optimism is definitely there,\u201d Henry Legg from th University of St Andrews told MIT Technology Review<\/a>, \u201cbut the science isn\u2019t there.\u201d It also doesn\u2019t help that a Microsoft research team in Delft, Netherlands announced that it had created Majorana states in 2018, only to retract the paper<\/a> three years later due to erroneously omitted data<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, Microsoft technical fellow Chetan Nayak remains bullish on their breakthrough<\/a>, telling The New York Times<\/a> that the quantum computing era could begin \u201cas something that is years away, not decades away.\u201d<\/p>\n With the introduction of Majorana 1 and the resulting Nature paper, the team has definitely demonstrated that they have a qubit. Now, they need to prove its topological nature and start making some computations. If Microsoft can prove that its Topological Core is the real deal, then we very well may be on the path to one million qubits and a computational revolution<\/a>.<\/p>\n Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes\/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The biggest limitation of quantum computers is that they only contain, at max, around 1,000 qubits due to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":57267,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[353,85,46,43,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-57266","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-computing","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57266\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n