Majorana 1: Microsoft Under Fire For Claiming It Has A New Quantum Computer
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Researchers have criticised Microsoft's new Majorana 1 quantum computer, saying it has made claims about the way it works that aren't fully backed up by scientific evidence
Last month Microsoft announced, with fanfare, that it had created a new kind of matter and used it to make a quantum computer architecture that could lead to machines capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades".
But since then, the tech giant has increasingly come under fire from researchers who say it has done nothing of the sort. My impression is that the response of the expert physics community has been overwhelmingly negative. Privately, people are just outraged," says Sergey Frolov at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Microsoft's claim rests on elusive and exotic quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes (MZMs). These can theoretically be used to create a topological qubit, a new type of quantum bit - the building blocks of information processing within a quantum computer. Because of their inherent properties, such qubits could excel at reducing errors, addressing a big shortcoming of all quantum computers in use today.
MZM's have been theorised to emerge from the collective behaviour of electrons at the edges of thin superconducting wires. Microsoft's new Majorana 1 chip contains several such wires and, according to the firm, enough MZMs to make eight topological qubits. A Microsoft spokesperson told New Scientist that the chip was a significant breakthrough for us and the industry".
Yet researchers say Microsoft hasn't provided enough evidence to support these claims. Alongside its press announcement, the company published a paper in the journal Nature that it said confirmed its results. 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," said a Microsoft press release.
But editors at Nature made it explicitly clear that this statement is incorrect. A publicly available report on the peer-review process states: The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices."
In other words, Microsoft and Nature are directly contradicting each other. The press releases have said something totally different [than the Nature paper]," says Henry Legg at the University of St Andrews in the UK.
[...] This isn't the only unorthodox aspect of Microsoft's paper. Legg points out that two of the four peer reviewers initially gave rather critical and negative feedback which, in his experience, would typically disqualify a paper from publication in the prestigious journal. The peer-review report shows that by the last round of editing, one reviewer still disagreed with publication of the paper, while the other three signed off on it. A spokesperson for Nature told New Scientist that the ultimate decision to publish came down to the potential they saw for experiments with future MZMs in Microsoft's device, rather than necessarily what it had achieved so far.
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