Microsoft's Quantum Breakthrough Claim Labeled 'Unreliable'

upstart writes:

Redmond insists it's got this right and has even more impressive results to share soon:

Updated Microsoft's claim of a quantum computing breakthrough has attracted strong criticism from scientists, though the software giant says its work is sound - and it will soon reveal data that proves it.

Redmond's quantum claims were made in February when it announced its in-house boffins had created "the world's first topoconductor, a breakthrough type of material which can observe and control Majorana particles to produce more reliable and scalable qubits, which are the building blocks for quantum computers."

This is a piece of alleged technology based on basic physics that has not been established

The Windows maker showed off a quantum chip called Majorana 1, based on a Topological Core architecture, which it said could power future quantum computers that pack a million qubits. Quantum computers with even a few hundred qubits are promised to be so powerful that the device you're reading this on might as well be a broken abacus.

Microsoft's claims were astounding because Majorana particles were first theorized in 1937 but detecting them has proved difficult. Yet Microsoft told the world it not only observed Majorana particles but had learned how to put them to work in a machine packing eight topological qubits.

The super-corporation has made big claims about Majorana particles before, but it didn't end well: In 2021 Redmond's researchers retracted a 2018 paper in which they claimed to have detected the particles.

Shortly after Microsoft's recent announcement, scientists expressed concern that the claims in the company's paper, published in Nature, lacked important details.

Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak has reaffirmed Redmond's claims and pointed out that the paper was submitted in March 2024 and published in February 2025. In the intervening months he said Microsoft has made even more progress that he will discuss at an American Physical Society (APS) meeting scheduled for next week in California.

While the quantum world waits for that update, critics have voiced their concerns about Microsoft's paper.

Henry Legg, a lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK, recently published a pre-print critique that argues the software giant's work "is not reliable and must be revisited."

Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist at the German national research organization Forschungszentrum Julich, and Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube to criticize "distractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum."

Frolov went even further when discussing the matter with The Register.

"These concerns go back quite a number of years so [the community reaction] hasn't just been triggered by this announcement per se," Frolov told The Register. "It was just made in such a dramatic way that it, I guess, triggered a reaction but [it hasn't altered] the underlying sort of understanding that this is essentially a fraudulent project."

Asked to elaborate on that characterization, Frolov said: "This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established. So this is a pretty big problem."

Frolov also claimed Microsoft shared data with some select scientists a few weeks ago, ahead of next week's APS meeting, and that those invited to hear more did not come away more confident about Microsoft's claims.

"I was not there but I spoke with a few people that were ... and people were not impressed and there was a lot of criticism," he said.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.