Microsoft unveiled Majorana 1 today, marking a breakthrough as the first quantum chip in the world driven by a cutting-edge Topological Core architecture. This innovative technology is anticipated to enable quantum computers to tackle significant, industrial-scale challenges within years instead of decades.
The topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state. This is harnessed to produce a more stable qubit that is fast, small and can be digitally controlled, without the tradeoffs required by current alternatives.
Ok, this is not a gas, liquid or solid? I feel like a need a diagram to understand what this means but it is interesting to see what this kind of material actually permits:
The disadvantage is – or was – that until recently the exotic particles Microsoft sought to use, called Majoranas, had never been seen or made. They don’t exist in nature and can only be coaxed into existence with magnetic fields and superconductors. The difficulty of developing the right materials to create the exotic particles and their associated topological state of matter is why most quantum efforts have focused on other kinds of qubits.
The Nature paper marks peer-reviewed confirmation that Microsoft has not only been able to create Majorana particles, which help protect quantum information from random disturbance, but can also reliably measure that information from them using microwaves.
Majoranas hide quantum information, making it more robust, but also harder to measure. The Microsoft team’s new measurement approach is so precise it can detect the difference between one billion and one billion and one electrons in a superconducting wire – which tells the computer what state the qubit is in and forms the basis for quantum computation.
Matthias Troyer, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, said “…a laptop can solve the problem of 10 electrons, a super-computer can solve the problem of 20 electrons, but no classical computer in the world can exactly solve the behavior of thirty or forty or fifty electrons”. In fact to solve this problem with a classical computer would require the estimated life time of the universe to solve.
