Microsoft announced a breakthrough in quantum computing today, unveiling a new kind of quantum processing unit, using a new type of material, to create what it says is a “radically different type of qubit.”
The Majorana 1 – named after the Majorana quasiparticle – is designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip that can fit in the palm of a hand. The goal is to bring the timeline for practical, reliable, large-scale quantum computers from decades down to years.
The new chip uses a new state of matter. Instead of solid, liquid, or gas, it is in a topological state. The breakthrough required developing a new material made of indium arsenide and aluminum, which Microsoft designed and fabricated atom by atom.
Majorana-based topological qubits is an approach that Microsoft has been pursuing for 20 years. Topological qubits are expected to be more stable than traditional qubits. It’s similar to how a knot in a rope remains in place even if someone jerks on the rope – the topological property of the knot itself keeps it in place.
“We took a step back and said ‘Ok, let’s invent the transistor for the quantum age. What properties does it need to have?’” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow, in a statement.
Stability and reliability are key to making quantum computing work. “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,” Nayak said. “We have actually worked out a path to a million.”
Traditional qubits are extremely vulnerable to any change in their environment, which makes it difficult to scale up a quantum computer. But the new topological qubits need ten times less error-correction overhead, according to Microsoft. Traditional qubits also require analog controls, like turning a dial. Topological qubits, by comparison, can be controlled digitally.
“The results are real,” says Gabriel Aeppli, head of the photon science division of Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute and a professor of physics at ETH Zurich. “In principle, topological approaches to quantum computing are ‘digital,’ and should scale better than more conventional approaches which can be seen as ‘analog.’”
How a topological qubit is built
Microsoft published a paper today in Nature magazine that describes how the topological qubits’ exotic quantum properties were created and how researchers were able to measure them.
The way it works is that four controllable Majoranas are joined together into the letter “H” with aluminum nanowires. Then, these individual H’s can be connected and laid on a chip, like floor tiles. “It’s complex in that we had to show a new state of matter to get there, but after that, it’s fairly simple. It tiles out. You have this much simpler architecture that promises a much faster path to scale,” said Krysta Svore, Microsoft technical fellow, in a statement.
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John Brecher for Microsoft
The chips themselves are then combined with control logic and a refrigerator that keeps the whole system colder than outer space. Then, a software stack is used to program the chip and to connect with AI and classical computers – and all these individual pieces already exist, Svore said.
However, it will take years of engineering work to get everything to work together at scale, Microsoft said.
Meanwhile, enterprises can already experiment with quantum logic by accessing simulators and actual – small-scale – quantum computers through various quantum computing platforms. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM, among others, all offer cloud-based quantum computing.
Majorana 1 can be “easily deployed inside Azure datacenters,” Microsoft said. However, the company did not say when the computer will become commercially available or what it will be able to do that other quantum computers cannot. Today’s announcement only proves that a topological qubit can be built.
Early Majorana research and what’s coming next
“With the core building blocks now demonstrated—quantum information encoded in MZMs [Majorana zero nodes], protected by topology, and processed through measurements—we’re ready to move from physics breakthrough to practical implementation,” Nayak wrote in a blog post today.
Now that the company has successfully demonstrated the world’s first topological qubit, the next step is to start building a scalable architecture around it, according to Nayak. A two-qubit system will demonstrate entanglement. Then an eight-qubit array will be used to implement error detection on two logical qubits.
The breakthrough is real and a huge engineering success, says Sankar Das Sarma, quantum physics professor at the University of Maryland. “But much more improvement is necessary before we can definitively say that this will lead to a commercial quantum computer.”
Microsoft’s single Majorana qubit is far behind what other quantum companies have in place. IBM, for example, has a 156-qubit quantum processor.
But the number of qubits is actually a minor measure, Das Sarma tells Network World. “What matters more is how error-free the qubits are. Microsoft’s qubits are intrinsically error-free giving them some unique advantages. Of course, they need to scale up and it is possible that they will succeed. We will see.”
In theory, at least, the new topological qubits will not only be able to scale faster, but do so more reliably, and take up much less space than today’s leading alternatives, Microsoft says.
“Scalability is absolutely real since it is made of tiny semiconductor wires,” says Das Sarma. “It scales up better than most other quantum computing platforms.”
In fact, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Microsoft as one of only two companies to advance to the final phase of its quantum computing evaluation program, which is looking to achieve utility-scale quantum operations by 2033.
Microsoft had a tough road getting here. In 2018, Microsoft researchers published a paper on Majoranas that was subsequently retracted, and some researchers doubted the elusive Majorana quasiparticles could ever be harnessed into qubits at all. But Microsoft continued with the research, and, in 2022, was finally able to demonstrate the existence of Majorana zero nodes, first theorized in 1937.
Majorana zero nodes are quasiparticles that are their own antiparticles. Specifically, they’re a type of anyon – a quasiparticle that exists in two dimensions and, when braided, can approximate quantum operations.
This is all cutting-edge physics stuff and incredibly difficult to understand, much less calculate and turn into working devices.
“Ironically, it’s also why we need a quantum computer – because understanding these materials is incredibly hard,” said Microsoft’s Svore. “With a scaled quantum computer, we will be able to predict materials with even better properties for building the next generation of quantum computers beyond scale.”
Source:: Network World