Will Microsoft's new AI chip change the quantum computing equation?

Quantum computing, or the race to make it a reality, may have entered a new era with Microsoft's announcement that it has developed a new quantum computing chip, Majorana 1, that can potentially fit a million qubits (quantum bits).

- Vishal Mathur

NEW DELHI: The discovery can make quantum computing a reality, at some point in the future.

Microsoft has achieved this by creating a new state of matter according to the company; essentially a new material made from indium arsenide and aluminum (the first is a semiconductor and the latter is a superconductor when cooled).

At the heart of Microsoft's creation is a concept called a topological qubit. That warrants some explanation. Traditional computing stores information in bits, encoded as either a one or a zero. Quantum computing is built around qubits that do both at the same time (a bit like Schrödinger's cat). The only problem is that the minute someone tries to read a qubit, it collapses into either a 1 or a 0 (this is called decoherence). A topological qubit prevents that from happening. The term is derived from the mathematical concept of topology, which deals with the properties of an object (or material) that stays constant under stress.

Other companies working on quantum computing—Google announced its own breakthrough in December—address the problem through other means. For instance, Google uses a technique called quantum error correction.

Majorana 1—named after Majorana nodes, a sort of Holy Grail for physicists because they are quantum bits that do not decohere; in turn named after Ettore Majorana, an Italian theoretical physicist who in 1937 discovered particles that can be their own anti-particles—holds 8 topological qubits and is the first of its kind to have a significant scalability runway.

A '20-year pursuit'

Microsoft's leap in quantum computing chips closely follows Google's Willow chip, IBM's Quantum Heron now leveraging Qiskit quantum software, as well as the Zuchongzhi 3.0 developed by Chinese scientists late last year.