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Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

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Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#151

Post by gus_massa »

eamag wrote: post #19

What do they mean by >can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state

People working in solid state is weird. [1]

For example in some cases they have a "gas" of electrons. It's not a normal gas that you can put in a balloon, it only can live inside a solid. If you ignore the atoms in the solid, in some cases the electrons are free enough to think they are a gas. That is similar enough to a normal gas, and then they just call it a gas.

Sometimes the interesting part is a surface between two semiconductors, so they may have a 2D gas. (I'm not sure if this experiment is in 2D or 3D.)

Sometimes the electrons make weird patterns, that are very stable and move around without deformation, and they will call it a quasiparticle, and ignore that it's formed by electrons, and directly think that it's a single entity. And analyze how this quasiparticles apear an disappear and colide with other particles. It's like working on a high level of abstraction, to make the calculations easier. [2]

In particular, if you arrange the electrons very smartly, they create a quasiparticle that is it's own anti-quasipartilce. In particular, this is a Majorana quasiparticle.

This is somewhat related to topological properties of the distribution of the properties of the electrons. Were topological means that is stable under smooth deformations and that helps to make it also stable under thermal noise and other ugly interference. But this is going too far from my area, so my handwaving is not very reliable.

[1] They probably think my area is weird, so we are even :) .

[2] Sometimes the high level abstraction is not an approximation.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#152

Post by erikig »

radioactivist wrote: post #64
crystal_revenge wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what's changed? Maybe I'm too cynical, but I suspect pressure from leadership to package whatever they had in vague language and ambiguous terms to create marketing copy that makes it appear the team is doing amazing work even though in two years we'll still be in roughly the same place we are today wrt quantum computing. Reading through the announcement I see lots of interesting sounding ideas and claims…

It's worse than that -- this announcement is about one qubit, so even a few thousand not necessarily close at hand for this platform (let alone millions).

I believe the chip is 8 qubits not just one.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#153

Post by erikig »

breckenedge wrote: post #66
erikig wrote: post #16

From a casual observer, it seemed like Microsoft's Majorana approach had hit a wall a few years back when there were retractions by the lead researchers. I wonder what's changed? https://cacm.acm.org/news/majorana-meltdown-jeopardizes-micr...

The ArsTechnica article discusses that. > In fact, there was some controversy over the first attempts to do so, with an early paper having been retracted after a reanalysis of its data showed that the evidence was weaker than had initially been presented. A key focus of the new Nature paper is providing more evidence that Majorana zero modes really exist in this system. https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/microso…

Thanks for sharing, the ArsTechnica article does a good job of bridging the info from the press release and the research in the Nature paper while addressing the setbacks in the field.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#154

Post by drdeca »

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #144
Mithriil wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum computing is a generalization of classical computing. Thus, they CAN do classical computing. But, in practice, it'll be not as fast, more error prone and at a bigger cost.

> Quantum computing is a generalization of classical computing Can you explain more or share some resources?

Any basic operation you can do with reversible computing on bits, can be done with qubits.

Any basic operation you can do with normal computing on bits can be done with reversible computing on bits provided that you have enough ancillary bits to store the information that would normally be deleted in the irreversible normal operation on bits.

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#155

Post by ABS »

dwnw wrote: post #113
ABS wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is from 2 days ago: Roadmap to fault tolerant quantum computation using topological qubit arrays https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12252

it is amazing at what passes for an academic paper these days

via the Quantum Buillshit Detector account:

https://bsky.app/profile/spinespresso.bsky.social/post/3lijd...

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#156

Post by est »

euclid211 wrote: post #149
singularity2001 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

given a million qubits ... also last time I checked the record was 80 qubits and with every doubling of the cubits the complexity of the system and the impurities and the noise are increasing. so it's even questionable whether there will ever be useful quantum computers

The issue isn't really impurities and noise, quantum error-correction solves that problem. The issue is that the supporting technologies don't scale well. Superconducting qubit computers like google's have a bunch of fancy wires coming out of the top, basically one for each qubit. You can't have a million wires that size, or even a smaller size, so the RF circuitry that sends signals down those wires needs to be mini…

There're some crazy wires at the end of the official video

https://youtu.be/wSHmygPQukQ?t=723

Is this the scaling problem you are describing?

Re: Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor

#159

Post by jlo2365 »

gus_massa wrote: post #151
eamag wrote: post #19

What do they mean by >can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state

People working in solid state is weird. [1] For example in some cases they have a "gas" of electrons. It's not a normal gas that you can put in a balloon, it only can live inside a solid. If you ignore the atoms in the solid, in some cases the electrons are free enough to think they are a gas. That is similar enough to a normal gas, and then they just call it a gas. Sometimes the interesting part is a surface between…

Weird. Any good suggestions for further reading on this stuff or is it mostly still academic literature level?
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