Microsoft takes a new leap forward in the quantum race. The end goal of creating a viable and useful quantum computer may still seem far away, especially given the complex workloads expected from such a machine. However, it is certain that these incremental steps will have great results in the future.
The breakthrough, Microsoft says, is about the ability to sustain a quantum bit the company calls a “topological qubit.” Researchers say they’ve discovered what’s known as the Majorana zero knot.
Microsoft’s Dr. “We discovered that we can generate the topological superconducting phase and its accompanying Majorana zero modes, which removes a major barrier to building a scaled-up quantum machine,” says Chetan Nayak.
Nayak continues, “The description of our work and methods demonstrates that the physics underlying a topological qubit are sound – the observation of a topological gap of 30 µeV is a first in this work and the groundwork for the potential future of topological quantum computing “As engineering challenges remain, this discovery proves to be a fundamental building block for our approach to a scaled quantum computer and sets Microsoft on track to deliver a quantum machine in Azure that will help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.”
Full technical details are quite complex and contain technical terms. Check out the blog post for more details.
Quantum computing, due to its enormous potential, is currently one of the biggest focus of attention of Microsoft, Google, IBM, Amazon and many other big technology companies. Unlike the current binary computation model, where operations have a value of 0 or 1, quantum computing promises to allow states in between, i.e. both 0 and 1 are possible at the same time. This is achieved through quantum bits or qubits
The exact use cases of such machines remain a mystery. But such enormous computational power would certainly be useful for analyzing large amounts of data such as molecular research…
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