{"id":61322,"date":"2025-04-29T22:26:23","date_gmt":"2025-04-29T22:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/61322\/"},"modified":"2025-04-29T22:26:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-29T22:26:23","slug":"a-new-microsoft-chip-could-lead-to-more-stable-quantum-computers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/61322\/","title":{"rendered":"A new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Microsoft has been on a quest to synthesize this state, called a Majorana fermion, in the form of quasiparticles. The Majorana was first proposed nearly 90 years ago as a particle that is its own antiparticle, which means two Majoranas will annihilate when they encounter one another. With the right conditions and physical setup, the company has been hoping to get behavior matching that of the Majorana fermion within materials.<\/p>\n

In the last few years, Microsoft\u2019s approach has centered on creating a very thin wire or “nanowire” from indium arsenide, a semiconductor. This material is placed in close proximity to aluminum, which becomes a superconductor close to absolute zero and can be used to create superconductivity in the nanowire.<\/p>\n

Ordinarily you\u2019re not likely to find any unpaired electrons skittering about in a superconductor\u2014electrons like to pair up. But under the right conditions in the nanowire, it\u2019s theoretically possible for an electron to hide itself, with each half hiding at either end of the wire. If these complex entities, called Majorana zero modes, can be coaxed into existence, they will be difficult to destroy, making them intrinsically stable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201dNow you can see the advantage,\u201d says Sankar Das Sarma<\/a>, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland who did early work on this concept. \u201cYou cannot destroy a half electron, right? If you try to destroy a half electron, that means only a half electron is left. That\u2019s not allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2023, the Microsoft team published a paper<\/a> in the journal Physical Review B claiming that this system had passed a specific protocol designed to assess the presence of Majorana zero modes. This week in Nature, the researchers reported that they can \u201cread out\u201d the information in these nanowires\u2014specifically, whether there are Majorana zero modes hiding at the wires\u2019 ends. If there are, that means the wire has an extra, unpaired electron.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we did in the Nature paper is we showed how to measure the even or oddness,\u201d says Nayak. \u201cTo be able to tell whether there\u2019s 10 million or 10 million and one electrons in one of these wires.\u201d That\u2019s an important step by itself, because the company aims to use those two states\u2014an even or odd number of electrons in the nanowire\u2014as the 0s and 1s in its qubits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If these quasiparticles exist, it should be possible to \u201cbraid\u201d the four Majorana zero modes in a pair of nanowires around one another by making specific measurements in a specific order. The result would be a qubit with a mix of these two states, even and odd. Nayak says the team has done just that, creating a two-level quantum system, and that it is currently working on a paper on the results.<\/p>\n

Researchers outside the company say they cannot comment on the qubit results, since that paper is not yet available. But some have hopeful things to say about the findings published so far. \u201cI find it very encouraging,\u201d says Travis Humble<\/a>, director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. \u201cIt is not yet enough to claim that they have created topological qubits. There\u2019s still more work to be done there,\u201d he says. But \u201cthis is a good first step toward validating the type of protection that they hope to create.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft has been on a quest to synthesize this state, called a Majorana fermion, in the form of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3164],"tags":[3284,3358,15109,53,31712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-61322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-computing","9":"tag-quantum-computing","10":"tag-qubits","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-topological-quantum-computing","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114423606946812071","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}