However, in the real world, the medium on which this happens is very disordered, so due to Anderson localization, anyons are actually trapped where they spawned. When talking about theoretical TQC, we are often talking about actually moving anyons confined to a 2D surface around. But they are immune to most typical errors.
They are not immune to all forms of errors - for instance, cosmic rays could cause unwanted anyons to form. Of course more hardware for manipulating additional qubits simultaneously may be desired - but the point is that the scaling problem is theoretically easier for TQC, even if creating the first qubit seems to be much more difficult. On the other hand, TQC is supposed to be able to scale much faster, since the way in which you create a new qubit (by creating several anyons) doesn't necessarily require additional hardware - you could move the anyons for one qubit out of the way, and then use the same device you used to make them to make another. Nobody has yet built a topological qubit though, but Microsoft has claimed to be close for at least 5+ years now. Surface codes, like the ones discussed in the article, are essentially a way to simulate a kind of topological quantum computer on other architectures. “And we expect to capitalize on this to do the almost unthinkable - to push toward a fault-tolerant quantum machine that will enable computation on an entirely new level that’s closer to the way nature operates.This is the correct answer.
#Microsoft big win quantum error after software
“What’s amazing is humans have been able to engineer a system to demonstrate one of the most exotic pieces of physics in the universe,” said Microsoft engineer Krysta Svore, who leads the company’s quantum software development program. But at least Microsoft’s researchers will have added confidence that they’re on the right track. Zulfi Alam, a corporate vice president who heads Microsoft’s quantum computing effort, said the hardware team has invited an external council of experts to review and validate the findings.Įven if the results are validated, it will take lots more research to create topological qubits and assemble a quantum computer that’s ready for prime time. “We looked at the data, and this was it.” “It was suddenly wow,” Roman Lutchyn, a Microsoft partner research manager with expertise in quantum simulation, said in a Microsoft report on the Majorana research. Other claims have met with controversy as well, casting doubt on the prospects for topological quantum computing. In 2018, a team of researchers reported that they had created the phenomenon, only to retract their claims three years later. Majorana zero modes have been a topic of theoretical interest since 1937, but for decades, they remained exclusively in the realm of theory. To keep those quantum states stable, the wires would host Majorana zero modes localized at each end. Microsoft has chosen a particularly exotic technological strategy, which involves inducing quantum states on topological superconducting wires. Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and other cloud-based services are already using hybrid systems to bring some of the benefits of the quantum approach to applications ranging from drug development to traffic management.Īt the same time, Microsoft and other companies are trying to build the hardware and software for “full-stack” quantum computing systems that can take on a far wider range of applications.
Scientists say the quantum approach can solve certain types of problems - for example, network optimization or simulations of molecular interactions - far more quickly than the classical approach. Quantum computing is a weird enough concept by itself: In contrast with the rigid one-or-zero world of classical computing, quantum computing juggles quantum bits, or qubits, that can represent ones and zeroes simultaneously until the results are read out. The phenomenon, known as a Majorana zero mode, is expected to smooth the path for topological quantum computing - the technological approach that’s favored by Microsoft’s Azure Quantum program. Microsoft says its researchers have found evidence of an exotic phenomenon that’s key to its plans to build general-purpose quantum computers.
Postdoctoral researcher Xiaojing Zhao works in Microsoft’s Quantum Materials Lab, where an important milestone towards creating a topological qubit and scalable quantum computer has been demonstrated.
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