I'm doing theorical research in the topological quantum computing.
The idea behind topological quantum computing is to utilize quantum materials whose low-energy physics looks like an error correcting code. Since these systems are very large (macroscopic number of atoms), the error rates are (theoretically) very low, ie the qubit is fault tolerant by construction, without any additional error correction. In reality, we do not know how good these qubits will be at finite temperature, with real life noise, etc.
Moreover, these states do not just occur in nature by themselves, so their construction requires engineering, and this is what Microsoft tries to do.
Unfortunately, Majoranas in nanowires have some history of exaggerated claims and data manipulation. Sergey Frolov's [1] twitter, one of the people behind original Majorana zero bias peaks paper, was my go-to source for that, but it looks like he deleted it.
There were also some concerns about previous Microsoft paper [2,3] as well as the unusual decision to publish it without the details to reproduce it [4].
In my opinion, Microsoft does solid science, it's just the problem they're trying to solve is very hard and there are many ways in which the results can be misleading. I also think it is likely that they are making progress on Majoranas, but I would be surprised if they will be able to show quantum memory/single qubit gates soon.
I’m an experimentalist at Microsoft Quantum who was involved in the work presented in our recent Nature publication. As an experimentalist, I can say these results are very exciting and would emphasize that the data are coming from real devices in the lab, not just theories. In the Nature paper, we present data from two different devices to demonstrate that the results are reproducible, and we performed additional measurements and modeling described in the supplemental material to rule out potential false positive scenarios.
In my opinion, the citations above do not represent a balanced view of the Majorana field status but are rather negative. We published two experimental papers recently that went through a rigorous peer review process. Additionally, we have engaged with the DARPA team to validate our results, and we actually have them measuring our devices in our Redmond lab.
Finally, we have exciting new results that we just shared with many experts in the field at the Station Q conference in Santa Barbara. These new experiments further probe our qubits and give us additional confidence that we are indeed operating topological qubits. We will share more broadly at the upcoming APS March meeting. For more information, please see the following post by my colleague Roman Lutchyn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/roman-lutchyn-bb9a382_interfe... ."
> I’m an experimentalist at Microsoft Quantum who was involved in the work presented in our recent Nature publication.
It is very cool to hear from you!
> In my opinion, the citations above do not represent a balanced view of the Majorana field status but are rather negative.
That's true, but the goal of the citations was to demonstrate there are some negative opinions too. Maybe together with positive OP these form a balanced view.
I understand that it can be very unpleasant to have people like Frolov or Legg trying to prove you're wrong, but I think it shoudn't be personal (from either side). Trying to find alternative explainations is part of science. And Frolov did turn out correct in past, and we did think we found Majoranas when in fact we didn't, and this part of the story can't be just ignored. Citing Feynman "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool". While it's tempting to dismiss the critics as broken record, I think it would both increase the credibility of the studies and improve the science if their criticism was taken at the face value. Answering specific points publicly would also create more balanced picture. I'm not aware of the responses to the cited opinions that I could cite to "balance out."
> We published two experimental papers recently that went through a rigorous peer review process.
Peer review is important, but is not the answer to specific claims, eg that TGP accuracy is overestimated, or (if we take Henry's word for it) the promised errata that never came out.
> Finally, we have exciting new results that we just shared with many experts in the field at the Station Q conference in Santa Barbara.
I've read about it from Das Sarma's twitter [1]. It does indeed sound exciting. If you're able to manipulate, store, and read out quantum data from qubit, then I think people will have easier time to agree you have one. There is of course question of non-Clifford gates, but that's a separate problem.
> We will share more broadly at the upcoming APS March meeting.
I look forward to hearing about it. If you (or someone from your team) are interested, I'd love to meet and chat at MM. My contacts are in bio.
Edit: I've also now seen Chetan Nayak's comment in Scott Aaronson blog with some details [2].
It is very hard to take the lot of you serious with press releases that talk about a million qbits, without mentioning what is in the device you built. Your press release seems to be engineered specifically to get misquoted by journalists. You don't have a million qbits, and you most certainly do not have the billions of gates required to utilize the million qbits, that you don't have, meaningfully.
You may claim that I have misunderstood something, all I can say is that that is 100% your fault, because you publish nothing but misinformation.
(That is the plural you, and I really do not care which one of you wrote the garbage, you work as a team and you get judged as a team.)
Are these actually even useful yet? Genuine question. I never managed to solicit and answer, only long explanations which seemed to have an answer of yes and no at the same time depending on who you observe.
The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers (so far) are better (given a million qubits) than classical computers at (problems that are in disguise) simulating quantum computers.
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
They can fundamentally break most asymmetric encryption, which is a good thing iff you want to do things that require forging signatures. Things like jailbreaks Apple can't patch, decryption tools that can break all E2E encryption, being able to easily steal your neighbor's Facebook login at the coffee shop...
Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't invent quantum computers[0].
[0] Yes, even with the upside of permanently jailbreakable iPhones.
Useful exclusively for generating random numbers, just like every other "quantum computer" (at least the ones publicly announced).
Each "quantum" announcement will make it sound like they have accomplished massive scientific leaps but in reality absolutely no "quantum computer" today can do anything other than generating random numbers (but they are forced to make those announcements to justify their continued funding).
I usually get downvoted when making this statement (of fact) but please know that I don't hate these researches or their work and generally hope their developments turn into a real thing at some point (just like I hope fusion eventually turns into a real / net positive thing).
Whoever decided to make up the non-existent term "topoconductor" for the purposes of this article deserves to feel shame and embarassment (I say this as a condensed matter physicist).
I skimmed through the paper but nowhere did I find a demonstration of a Majorana qubit or a zero mode. The achievement was that they demonstrated a single-shot measurement. That's nice, but where's the qubit? what did I miss?
Do you think this is partly every company now trying to get in on grifting? Just pumping stock with "we're going to mars, we'll have AGI, cold fusion is almost here" kind of stuff?
Genuinely curious: in what ways is that not a good term? Is it because its not a new thing, just marketing? Or is it conflating with some other physics things?
The ideas that underpin their device have been around for some time and aren't called by that name in the literature -- it appears to be entirely a branding exercise. A clear signal to me they don't seriously think it is a good name is that don't use the name outside this article (it appears nowhere in their Nature paper or anywhere else for that matter).
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?
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 that don't matter "designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip" (why does that matter if we're still far, far away from more than a few thousands qubits?) and zero statements about actual capabilities that are novel or ground breaking.
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).
> 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.
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.
Short Term - This might be hype. Sure. Getting some Buzz.
Long Term - MS seems pretty committed and serious. Putting in the time/money for a long term vision. Maybe a decade from now, we'll be bowing down to an all powerful MS God/Oracle/AI.
Readit News
The idea behind topological quantum computing is to utilize quantum materials whose low-energy physics looks like an error correcting code. Since these systems are very large (macroscopic number of atoms), the error rates are (theoretically) very low, ie the qubit is fault tolerant by construction, without any additional error correction. In reality, we do not know how good these qubits will be at finite temperature, with real life noise, etc.
Moreover, these states do not just occur in nature by themselves, so their construction requires engineering, and this is what Microsoft tries to do.
Unfortunately, Majoranas in nanowires have some history of exaggerated claims and data manipulation. Sergey Frolov's [1] twitter, one of the people behind original Majorana zero bias peaks paper, was my go-to source for that, but it looks like he deleted it.
There were also some concerns about previous Microsoft paper [2,3] as well as the unusual decision to publish it without the details to reproduce it [4].
In my opinion, Microsoft does solid science, it's just the problem they're trying to solve is very hard and there are many ways in which the results can be misleading. I also think it is likely that they are making progress on Majoranas, but I would be surprised if they will be able to show quantum memory/single qubit gates soon.
[1] https://spinespresso.substack.com/p/has-there-been-enough-re...
[2] https://x.com/PhysicsHenry/status/1670184166674112514
[3] https://x.com/PhysicsHenry/status/1892268229139042336
[4] https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.2...
In my opinion, the citations above do not represent a balanced view of the Majorana field status but are rather negative. We published two experimental papers recently that went through a rigorous peer review process. Additionally, we have engaged with the DARPA team to validate our results, and we actually have them measuring our devices in our Redmond lab.
Finally, we have exciting new results that we just shared with many experts in the field at the Station Q conference in Santa Barbara. These new experiments further probe our qubits and give us additional confidence that we are indeed operating topological qubits. We will share more broadly at the upcoming APS March meeting. For more information, please see the following post by my colleague Roman Lutchyn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/roman-lutchyn-bb9a382_interfe... ."
It is very cool to hear from you!
> In my opinion, the citations above do not represent a balanced view of the Majorana field status but are rather negative.
That's true, but the goal of the citations was to demonstrate there are some negative opinions too. Maybe together with positive OP these form a balanced view.
I understand that it can be very unpleasant to have people like Frolov or Legg trying to prove you're wrong, but I think it shoudn't be personal (from either side). Trying to find alternative explainations is part of science. And Frolov did turn out correct in past, and we did think we found Majoranas when in fact we didn't, and this part of the story can't be just ignored. Citing Feynman "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool". While it's tempting to dismiss the critics as broken record, I think it would both increase the credibility of the studies and improve the science if their criticism was taken at the face value. Answering specific points publicly would also create more balanced picture. I'm not aware of the responses to the cited opinions that I could cite to "balance out."
> We published two experimental papers recently that went through a rigorous peer review process.
Peer review is important, but is not the answer to specific claims, eg that TGP accuracy is overestimated, or (if we take Henry's word for it) the promised errata that never came out.
> Finally, we have exciting new results that we just shared with many experts in the field at the Station Q conference in Santa Barbara.
I've read about it from Das Sarma's twitter [1]. It does indeed sound exciting. If you're able to manipulate, store, and read out quantum data from qubit, then I think people will have easier time to agree you have one. There is of course question of non-Clifford gates, but that's a separate problem.
> We will share more broadly at the upcoming APS March meeting.
I look forward to hearing about it. If you (or someone from your team) are interested, I'd love to meet and chat at MM. My contacts are in bio.
Edit: I've also now seen Chetan Nayak's comment in Scott Aaronson blog with some details [2].
[1] https://x.com/condensed_the/status/1892595693002293279
[2] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8669#comment-2003328
You may claim that I have misunderstood something, all I can say is that that is 100% your fault, because you publish nothing but misinformation.
(That is the plural you, and I really do not care which one of you wrote the garbage, you work as a team and you get judged as a team.)
Deleted Comment
The long explanations boil down to this: quantum computers (so far) are better (given a million qubits) than classical computers at (problems that are in disguise) simulating quantum computers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093939#43094339
Come to think of it, maybe we shouldn't invent quantum computers[0].
[0] Yes, even with the upside of permanently jailbreakable iPhones.
It is frustrating to try to unpick the hype and filter the “will never work” from the “eureka!”
Each "quantum" announcement will make it sound like they have accomplished massive scientific leaps but in reality absolutely no "quantum computer" today can do anything other than generating random numbers (but they are forced to make those announcements to justify their continued funding).
I usually get downvoted when making this statement (of fact) but please know that I don't hate these researches or their work and generally hope their developments turn into a real thing at some point (just like I hope fusion eventually turns into a real / net positive thing).
Deleted Comment
https://cacm.acm.org/news/majorana-meltdown-jeopardizes-micr...
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 that don't matter "designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip" (why does that matter if we're still far, far away from more than a few thousands qubits?) and zero statements about actual capabilities that are novel or ground breaking.
> 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/microsoft-builds-its...
Long Term - MS seems pretty committed and serious. Putting in the time/money for a long term vision. Maybe a decade from now, we'll be bowing down to an all powerful MS God/Oracle/AI.