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“And now we have the unique growth and fabrication technologies to bring those ideas to life.
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“We are now led by designs that are based on simulations, not just someone batting ideas around in a conference room,” said Nayak.
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This new data and materials-driven approach have been the glue that holds Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing together. Ultimately, Microsoft settled on aluminum as the superconducting wire and indium arsenide as the semiconductor that surrounds it, and the company fabricates the devices itself.
MICROSOFT BIG QUANTUM ERROR AFTER ALL TRIAL
According to Nayak, "If you had to sort experimentally by trial and error, you would never be able to optimize over all those parameters in any reasonable amount of time." In addition, the simulations allowed Microsoft’s team to quickly iterate on both fronts, a process that would have been unfeasible with the stock, hands-on approach to materials engineering. This step requires tremendous amounts of computing power, but Microsoft does have one of the most powerful computing networks in the world with Azure. To achieve the final superconducting wire design that allows all this, Microsoft's research had to simulate the materials and their shape across 23 adjustable parameters. In an extremely simplified way, this is what grants MZMs their resilience to decoherence.
MICROSOFT BIG QUANTUM ERROR AFTER ALL FULL
The only way for someone to recover your full password would be to take both pieces of information and join them together to reveal the final result. In quantum terms, the information has become non-local. Whatever happens, no single one of them can disclose the password, irrespective of what methods are applied to reveal the information.
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You then give half of it to two of your trusted subordinates (before forgetting it forever). To better visualize this, imagine you’re a world-class villain, and you write the password to your doomsday device on a piece of paper. And depending on the engineering design, researchers can provide a measure of distance between the MZMs, creating a gap between them that reduces the chance of both particles decohering. However, because the information is only reachable by looking at both quasiparticles’ states simultaneously, the qubit’s state doesn’t decohere unless both MZMs are equally affected and “forced” to reveal their contents. The resilience of topological qubits comes from the fact that both MZMs (in Microsoft’s design, at each end of the U-shaped wire) are responsible for encoding the quantum information. This is the part Microsoft still hasn’t figured out: its design still hasn’t incorporated a quantum dot. This quantum dot serves as a control mechanism because its capacitance changes whenever it interacts with either of the Majorana zero modes, which allows it to be measured. Microsoft’s topological qubit design features a U-shaped wire with a Majorana zero mode at each end, thus providing physical separation, in proximity to a quantum dot. When qubits reveal their value too early, an error appears before the calculation is finished. Left unchecked, or not engineered against, this environmental noise leads to decoherence - the process by which qubits fall out of their superposition state and reveal their value. These MZMs have been shown to deposit as a layer on the surface of superconducting materials, and showcase extreme resilience to environmental noise (such as heat, stray subatomic particles or magnetic fields). Instead, they are theorized to exist (as we've covered and explored in further detail here) as pairs of Majorana zero modes (MZMs), a special type of quasiparticle that naturally behaves as if it were only half of an electron. The first thing to remember about topological qubits is that they still haven't materialized. But what is this long way around – what are topological qubits? Absence of Proof ≠ Proof of Absence Hence Microsoft’s choice to go the long way around. This is inefficient, especially when considering the current difficulties in scaling the number of qubits. And because IBM uses transmon-based qubits, the company’s devices have to be cooled to absolute zero (-273.15 ✬) to keep the qubits safe from environmental interference.Īnother element of note is that because non-topological qubits are particularly sensitive to decoherence, these quantum architectures usually include additional qubits whose only function is to provide a measure of error-correction capabilities, meaning that they aren’t directly employed in the calculations. The world’s record for the highest qubit-count on a single device, IBM’s Eagle, currently stands at 127 addressable qubits - a far cry from the million qubit figure Microsoft expects will be needed.