Smaller than a fingernail, and strong enough to power appliances from the tablet, phone, or computer you are reading this on, to cars: computer chips house the memory that makes the world go ‘round. But the computer chips, also known as microchips or Integrated Circuits (IC), that can be found in your phone are far from the extreme innovations that have come out of the industry today.
“Everything we know about digital computers is about to go out the window in the coming years,” CUNY professor of theoretical physics Michio Kaku said in an interview with Fox Business. What was once only a theoretical blueprint involving a new “topological” state of matter in quantum computing has now been fulfilled through Microsoft’s Majorana 1 Quantum Chip.
With enough power to someday simulate all laws of nature, and make groundbreaking discoveries in pharmaceuticals and machine learning, Majorana 1 seems a major step in a new direction, but to many in the field, this announcement may be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
The field of quantum computing that Majorana 1 hopes to make waves in is much more complex than that of classical computers. Allegedly, it is built on quantum mechanics, the study of subatomic particles, and employs qubits, the quantum equivalent of classical computer bits, to represent a 0, 1, or a combination of both unlike traditional binary code. These qubits are created by manipulating quantum particles such as electrons, photons, and trapped ions according to IBM.
“Majorana particles are particles which were implied in the 1930s by a guy called Ettore Majorana, […] he was an Italian physicist and he did calculations which suggested these particles should exist, he never actually made them, but there were particles which were both a particle and an antiparticle at the same time, so you had your binary particles, there’s zero and one in one particle,” CCHS Computer Science Teacher Mr. Nelson says.
Through said qubits, quantum computers would use states of superposition, entanglement, decoherence, and interference to process many possibilities and probabilities at once rather than separately as a classical computer would. Because of this, “quantum computers capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems [could develop] in years, not decades,” according to Microsoft.
Whereas a classical computer would escape a maze by guessing and checking every possible path one by one, a quantum computer would see the maze from a “bird’s-eye view” and instantaneously know the correct path.
Majorana 1 is groundbreaking though because it employs a new kind of “topological” qubit that is less prone to error due to its stronger connections, making computations much less inhibited by error.
“The particles which Microsoft have made show Majorana properties, but they’re actually combinations of other solid-state properties, solid-state particles in a particular arrangement that’s why they’re called topological, it’s for their arrangement. So they’re both a particle and an antiparticle,” Mr. Nelson explains.
Majorana 1 has only 8 topological qubits, making it more of an advertisement for a future 1 Million Qubit chip that would be able to compute complex problems. “What would the world look like with a computer that could accurately model the laws of nature? That is the promise of quantum computing,” Dr. Krysta Svore Technical Fellow at Microsoft says, on the future developments after Majorana 1.
Critics of the announcement have claimed that the chip itself is not built from the groundbreaking topological qubits discussed. “They supposedly said they had a topological qubit, when really the paper that they published explicitly said they did not […] they weaseled around the question by talking of a ‘topological core architecture’,” Sabine Hossenfelder, creator of “Science With Sabine”, said on the Science News YouTube channel.
Although discouraging, as this field of science continues at such a pach, Quantum computing like that in Majorana 1’s future is not impossible, only difficult, and most likely, not currently true.
Quantum processing would allow companies to simulate everything from how materials will work under high pressures or temperatures to helping create fusion nuclear reactors.
“Imagine, people like you will determine what it can do in the future. That’s what I’m teaching these kids, computer science for here, is to have something fantastic happen in the future,” Mr. Nelson says.
To many Majorana 1 might not be the godsend discovery Microsoft advertises, but could be a stepping stone in the continued march toward reliable Quantum computing.
