Powerful quantum computer just years away after chip breakthrough: Microsoft

Microsoft has announced a breakthrough it says could lead to a commercially useful quantum computer, more powerful than all the world’s computers combined, in a few years rather than decades.

Scientists hope large-scale quantum computers could reproduce the complex interactions of molecules within chemical reactions, accelerating our knowledge of health on an atomic level and unlocking new drugs, chemicals and self-healing building materials.

Microsoft’s new quantum chip is based on a new state of matter and a particle that previously only existed in theory.Credit: John Brecher/Microsoft

“These calculations are so complicated that if a classical computer was as big as this entire planet, it would still not be able to compute it,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president of quantum Zulfi Alam said.

“A quantum computer can do it, and can do it very, very well.”

The new chip, called Majorana 1, generates a new state of matter needed to control a mysterious, once-theoretical particle for calculations, the company said. The chip was crafted atom by atom from aluminium and a semiconductor used in night-vision goggles called indium arsenide.

Current computers are made from “bits”, which flip between 0 and 1. Quantum bits or “qubits” utilise subatomic particles which hover in a “superposition” of 0 and 1, harnessing the options in between these binary states to vastly accelerate calculations.

The new chip hosts eight qubits. Microsoft aims to scale up to a quantum computer with a million qubits – the number required for real-world applications such as inventing a catalyst for breaking down microplastics – that could fit in the palm of your hand.

For 20 years, Microsoft has pursued the creation of the new form of matter within the chip called a “topological state” where, put simply, quantum information is spread across a network of atoms rather than tied to a single particle.

Generating that new state of matter allowed researchers to create and control Majorana fermions, a type of particle theorised in 1937 that scientists have struggled to actually conjure into existence.

Scientific excitement surrounding the particles has been compared with the discovery of gravitational waves and the Higgs boson.

Theoretical quantum physicist Professor Stephen Bartlett, from the University of Sydney, said using a topological state to manipulate and measure these elusive particles for calculations is a “dark horse” approach to quantum computing.

“The Majorana particle is the name that we give to this dislocated quantum qubit that resides not in one end of a wire or the other, but is somehow pulled apart and spread across both ends,” he said.

Because the values of a topological qubit exist in more than one place at once, they’re protected from tiny magnetic interruptions or jostled atoms that can derail a quantum calculation.

Most quantum computing devices are plagued by these errors, which restricts the advancement of the technology.

The Microsoft researchers have published a paper in Nature detailing how they magicked the Majorana particles into existence.

“We’ve been discovering quantum particles for 100 years, but this is something that’s not just another particle. It is really something that’s new,” Bartlett said.

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