Much of the oxygen at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, was taken up by discussions of “topological qubits.” These quantum devices are theorized to be much less error prone and easier to scale up than other qubit technologies, but building one has been far from easy. Researchers from the Microsoft Azure Quantum team recently hinted that they had a working topological qubit, and yesterday the team’s leader, Chetan Nayak, presented their evidence at a high-octane session at the Summit. Many physicists attending the talk, however, expressed doubts about the claim.
Nayak’s presentation came in the wake of a controversy involving a Microsoft announcement last month. Following a Nature publication [1], Microsoft issued a press release describing the realization of the world’s first chip powered by topological qubits, which “could lead to quantum computers capable of solving meaningful problems in years, not decades.” However, this claim went beyond what was presented in the peer-reviewed material—Nature’s editorial team wrote in a note that the results do not represent evidence for topological modes, but the research offers a platform for manipulating such modes in the future (see Research News: Experts Weigh in on Microsoft’s Topological Qubit Claim). At the time, Nayak said the evidence would be offered by his presentation at the Summit.\
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