The News
Microsoft said Wednesday it had created a new state of matter that is not a solid, liquid, or gas, as it unveiled a powerful new chip that marks the latest development in the quest to create quantum computers.
The company is hailing the chip, called Majorana 1, as a milestone toward building a super-powerful quantum computer — machines that rely on particle physics to solve problems beyond the scope of ordinary computers. Its CEO said the chip could pave the way for solving problems that “all the computers on Earth today combined could not.”
The Majorana 1 chip was powered by a new type of material which it described as “the world’s first topoconductor” to help produce fewer error-prone qubits — the building blocks for quantum computers — than rivals like Google’s Willow chip.
Scientists were more cautious: “You have to verify… that a device behaves in all the magical ways that theory predicts it should; otherwise, the reality may turn out to be less rosy for quantum computing,” one physicist told The New York Times.