Microsoft announced today that it has made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up.
Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities to simulate complex materials and discover new ones, among many other possible applications.
To achieve that potential, though, we must build big enough systems that are stable enough to perform computations. Many of the technologies being explored today, such as the superconducting qubits pursued by Google and IBM, are so delicate that the resulting systems need to have many extra qubits to correct errors.
Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.
The pursuit has not been without setbacks, including a high-profile paper retraction by researchers associated with the company in 2018. But the Microsoft team, which has since pulled this research effort in house, claims it is now on track to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer containing a few thousand qubits in a matter of years and that it has a blueprint for building out chips that each contain a million qubits or so, a rough target that could be the point at which these computers really begin to show their power.
This week the company announced a few early successes on that path: piggybacking on a Nature paper published today that describes a fundamental validation of the system, the company says it has been testing a topological qubit, and that it has wired up a chip containing eight of them.
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