Microsoft says it has made one of quantum computing’s hardest problems dramatically easier.
Some physicists aren’t convinced.
Now DARPA gets to put its hands on the hardware.
Microsoft announced Tuesday that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will receive direct, on-site access to its latest quantum system at a new Maryland research center. The arrangement gives government evaluators something far more useful than another presentation about Microsoft’s roadmap. They can examine and test the technology itself.
The machine centers on Microsoft’s Majorana 2 technology. Microsoft says its newest topological qubits are more than 1,000 times more reliable than the previous generation. Their average lifetime is about 20 seconds, with some lasting more than a minute. The company says those advances have allowed it to cut its timetable in half and target a scalable quantum computer by 2029.
From Microsoft:
To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase. Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. This change in materials results in significant increases in performance, which are reflected in the improved robustness of the topological phase. The topological gap, which protects the topological qubits from environmental noise and errors, is more than double that of the previous quantum processor.
The gate-defined devices in our quantum processors are composed of tetrons, a type of topological qubit consisting of two superconducting nanowires with Majorana Zero Modes (MZMs) at their ends. MZMs are the building blocks of topological qubits, storing quantum information through parity, the evenness or oddness of the number of electrons in a topoconductor wire.
