Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled its new Majorana 1 chip, the result of one of the company's longest running research projects that it believes will be a game-changer for quantum computing.
The company described the Majorana 1 as the world's first quantum chip powered by a new topological core architecture, thus making it the world's first topological conductor, or topoconductor as the company called it.
According to Microsoft, the material that makes up the Majorana 1 is not a solid, a liquid or a gas.
“The key thing that we have done over the last couple of years is we have invented a new state of matter,” said Zulfi Alam, Microsoft's corporate vice president of quantum computing, told The National.
“What we have found is that in a when the material that we have created is super cold, we can essentially split electrons and create a new type of particle called the Majorana particle, and we have been able to not only showcase this particle, but now build devices out of this particle, control it, and essentially we built a brand new chip out of this."
Microsoft said the new material used in the chip required the development of an “entirely new material stack” made of indium arsenide and aluminium, which the company fabricated atom by atom.
Mr Alam said the end result of the new material was the ability to “scale up to million qubits” in a chip form factor that is smaller than the human palm.
A qubit is the basic unit of information used in quantum computing. Unlike traditional binary bits that use ones and zeroes, qubits use the quantum effect, allowing them to be simultaneously ones and zeroes. This can magnify processor power and allow for the crunching of tremendous amounts of data.
“Essentially, it [Majorana 1] enables us to to build a device that doesn't need external networking of any type. It's essentially a stand-alone unit of its own, and is able to have more computational power … effectively the entire planet in the palm of your hand,” said Mr Alam.
He said the chip had the potential to help create a solar cell that might enable electric cars to avoid plug-in charging, or make fertilisers that can increase crop yields by 100 per cent.
Perhaps more importantly, Mr Alam said the Majorana 1's power would help quantum computers deliver the promise of solving meaningful and complex problems within years, rather than the often projected decades.
“You could also imagine the advantage of that type of technology when talking about targeted medical drugs. The experimentation cycle becomes dramatically shorter, that's the big story here.”
Despite ample optimism and increasingly impressive developments in terms of computing power, quantum computers have sometimes struggled with reliability because of the complex nature of qubits.
Yet Mr Alam said Microsoft's decision to spend almost 20 years to make progress in the quantum realm is starting to pay off with Majorana 1, which the company said can be a boon to reliability.
“Yes, it took longer than been anticipated, and yes, it's been an extremely painful journey, but you know, it's an awesome journey, because we can build something that scales now,” he explained.
According to Microsoft, the company's journey to produce the topological state of matter that makes up the chip, proved to be difficult.
“We are literally spraying atom by atom. Those materials have to line up perfectly. If there are too many defects in the material stack, it just kills your qubit,” said Krysta Svore, a Microsoft technical fellow.
“It’s also why we need a quantum computer – because understanding these materials is incredibly hard. With a scaled quantum computer, we will be able to predict materials with even better properties for building the next generation of quantum computers beyond scale."
