Microsoft makes quantum computing breakthrough

Source: Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft. Majorana 1, the first quantum chip powered by a topological core based on a new class of materials developed by Microsoft. 

Microsoft has introduced Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a new architecture that it expects will lead to quantum computers that can solve industrial-scale problems in years, not decades. The company has placed eight topological qubits on a chip designed to scale to one million.

The new chip leverages the world’s first topoconductor, or topological superconductor, a category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas as is traditional, but a "topological state". This material can observe and control new quantum particles, called Majoranas, to produce more reliable, scalable qubits. Qubits are the building blocks for quantum computers, and their reliability and scalability have been obstacles* to the progress of quantum computing.

Microsoft said topoconductors and the chip enable a million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of one’s hand and fits into a quantum computer that can be deployed inside Azure data centres.

A million qubits is a milestone. “Whatever you’re doing in the quantum space needs to have a path to a million qubits. If it doesn’t, you’re going to hit a wall before you get to the scale at which you can solve the really important problems that motivate us,” Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow explained.

But reaching the next horizon of quantum computing will also require a quantum architecture that can handle trillions of fast and reliable operations. The topoconductor produces a more stable qubit that is small, fast, and digitally controllable. Current approaches control each qubit in an analogue way, which would be impractical for trillions of operations, but digital control changes things.

The breakthrough required developing an entirely new materials stack made of indium arsenide and aluminum, much of which Microsoft designed and fabricated atom by atom. The goal was to generate Majoranas and take advantage of their unique properties to reach the next horizon of quantum computing, Microsoft said.

In addition to making its own quantum hardware, Microsoft has partnered with Quantinuum and Atom Computing to reach scientific and engineering breakthroughs with today’s qubits. The company announced the industry’s first reliable quantum computer last year.

According to Microsoft, quantum computers could solve many of the world's problems. “Any company that makes anything could just design it perfectly the first time out. It would just give you the answer,” Matthias Troyer, Microsoft technical fellow said.

“The quantum computer teaches the AI the language of nature so the AI can just tell you the recipe for what you want to make.”

*Microsoft explained that qubits can fall apart under specific conditions, leading to lost information to be lost. Their state can also be affected by the act of measurement. – a problem because measuring is essential for computing. One of the challenges of quantum computing has been to develop a qubit that can be measured and controlled, while offering protection from environmental noise that corrupts them.

Microsoft also revealed that it had decided 20 years ago to develop topological qubits, which it believed would offer more stable qubits requiring less error correction, thereby unlocking speed, size and controllability advantages. Until recently, the quantum particles Microsoft sought to use, Majoranas, had never been seen or made. They don’t exist in nature and can only be created with magnetic fields and superconductors. These challenges are why most quantum efforts 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.

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Watch the associated video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4xCR20Dh1E

Read Nature: Interferometric Single-Shot Parity Measurement in InAs-Al Hybrid Devices at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08445-2

Read arXiv: Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays at https://aka.ms/MSBrandArXivTopo