Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor (opens in new tab)

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 know nothing about quantum computing, but constructing a physical system that resembles error correcting codes sounds absolutely fascinating.

No.

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.

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.

yes, they are useful... as marketing materials. Other than that, not at all.

Sounds exactly like a quantum state itself!

It is frustrating to try to unpick the hype and filter the “will never work” from the “eureka!”

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).

No

Only if you use them in conjunction with an HTML5 supercomputer. (Sorry, I couldn't resist with Nikola in the news again)

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?

Come for the made-up jargon, stay for the horrific PR abuse of the English language like "Unlocking quantum’s promise"

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?

Another condmat physicist wondering how this work got so hyped up. Single shot parity measurements are not new.

> 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.

The ArsTechnica article discusses that.

> 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...

Matter refers to particles or collection of particles that have mass+volume. These particles can be arranged or behave in different ways, and that is roughly what a "state of matter" is. You know how in solid all the atoms are fixed, but in a gas atoms/molecules are flying about.

There are in fact other forms of matter. In plasma you just have ions (instead of atoms/molecules) just zipping about. In neutron stars, you have pretty much only neutrons collapsed into a packed ball.

You can also make systems at higher levels of abstraction that have some of this matter or particle like behavior. A simple example is "phonons", which are a small packet of vibration (of atoms) that travels inside a solid much like a photon travels through space. I think phonons don't have a "mass", so they are not matter.

Here, they construct a quantum system, some of whose degrees of freedom behave like a matter particle. Qubits are then made from the states of this particle.

People working in solid state is weird. [1]

For example in some cases they have a "gas" of electrons. It's not a normal gas that you can put in a balloon, it only can live inside a solid. If you ignore the atoms in the solid, in some cases the electrons are free enough to think they are a gas. That is similar enough to a normal gas, and then they just call it a gas.

Sometimes the interesting part is a surface between two semiconductors, so they may have a 2D gas. (I'm not sure if this experiment is in 2D or 3D.)

Sometimes the electrons make weird patterns, that are very stable and move around without deformation, and they will call it a quasiparticle, and ignore that it's formed by electrons, and directly think that it's a single entity. And analyze how this quasiparticles apear an disappear and colide with other particles. It's like working on a high level of abstraction, to make the calculations easier. [2]

In particular, if you arrange the electrons very smartly, they create a quasiparticle that is it's own anti-quasipartilce. In particular, this is a Majorana quasiparticle.

This is somewhat related to topological properties of the distribution of the properties of the electrons. Were topological means that is stable under smooth deformations and that helps to make it also stable under thermal noise and other ugly interference. But this is going too far from my area, so my handwaving is not very reliable.

[1] They probably think my area is weird, so we are even :) .

[2] Sometimes the high level abstraction is not an approximation.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_order.

For reference topological phases of matter have been observed in other contexts since the mid-1980s. So "entirely new" here is misleading.

We are approaching a full "post truth" society, nothing will be sacred.

through geometry and configuration of materials, you can create quantum effects on a macroscopic scale

The claim/hope is that topological qubits are fault tolerant or at least suffer from much lower errors (very roughly you can think of topological qubits as an error correction code built of the atoms, ie on scale of Avogadro's number). If, for example they could build a single qubit even with 10^-6 error rates that would in fact put them __ahead__ of all other attempts at the path to fault tolerance (but no NISQ).

It is unfortunately unclear how good the topological qubits practically are.

Being able to detect a single electron among billions sounds more like a good way to get entropy rather than something that can help with quantum measurements. At least that's my initial intuition being completely ignorant in Quantum Computing.

They have never demonstrated even a single physical qubit.

Microsoft has claimed for a while to have observed some signatures of quantized Majorana conductance which might potentially allow building a qubit in the future. However, other researches in the field have strongly criticized their analysis, and the field is full of retracted papers and allegations of scientific misconduct.

They have no qubits at all, "logical" or not. yet. They plan to make millions. It is substantially easier to release a plan for millions of qubits than it is to make even one.

I work in the field. While all players are selling a dream right now, this announcement is even more farcical. Majoranas are still trying to get to the point where they have even one qubit that could be said to exist and whose performance can be quantified.

The majorana approach (compared with more mature technologies like superconducting circuits or trapped ions) is a long game, where there are theoretical reasons to be optimistic, but where experimental reality is so far behind. It might work in the long run, but we're not there yet.

> "Every single atom in this chip is placed purposefully. It is constructed from ground up. It is entirely a new state of matter. Think of us as building the picture by painting it atom by atom."

https://youtu.be/wSHmygPQukQ (~7:55)

I don't know if marketing BS could get more hyperbolic than this.

Whenever I read about a scientific breakthrough I login to HN to see what the smart people think about it, and am disappointed if there isn't a post with hundreds of comments.

Just look at all the hard numbers they provided after you strip away the hype talk.

I wouldn't trust HN one bit (or one qubit) to comment usefully on this question, but presumably hundreds of people are already bugging Scott Aaronson to blog about it. He'll probably have a post in the next couple days saying whether we have permission to be excited.

If you can break bitcoin, you can also break all the encryption we use for banking and other transactions, so might as well stock up on SPAM and ammo.

Cryptocoins like Bitcoin only need DSA. Quantum-proof DSAs have been widely known since the 1970s*. Bitcoin only needs to change its DSA - and then everything will be fine.

* see Lamport signatures

Great question are people predicting we will have enough computing power to "break" bitcoin? How much is needed?

They can break 1-bit-coin. How's that for ya?

> Any word if it works without a Microsoft account?

No. And it needs telemetry too. Scrollbars are optional. Abusing transient windows, are not.

Can we please have a discussion based solely on the content of the article? I know we all hate Microsoft's business practices, but let's try to limit our tendency to turn the discussion into a typical Reddit-esque thread.

Best I can tell is the chip has 8

That word "direct" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

It makes the statement unfalsifiable: no matter how long it takes, how twisty the path turns out to be, it will always be a direct path, because what is a path after all if not direct?

He didnt say shortest path, quickest path, or any other qualifier that would set visions of nodes and edges and Graph 101 dancing in our nerdy little heads. It's marketing. Good marketing. I hope they can deliver on it.

Because I decrypted the whole blockchain using my free Azure subscription and started pumping it.

Agree. Why would I buy Apple M4 macbook when I can have Majorana 1 running Windows 11 and install MS Teams to be extra productive.

When a company that makes quantum computers is on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge

1 qubit prototype can crack RSA? 1million scaled out qubits is still talk

Please someone give input on this. It's extremely important and worrying.

My hunch is somewhere between “decades” and “never”.

Can any modern company be said to be of similar size to Bell Labs in it's prime? Bell Labs were only possible due to a monopoly supplying massive amounts of funding for about a century. MS had a few decades of domination in the consumer desktop OS space, but they always had competition and I would be very surprised if they had the kind of revenue streams that make this type of long-term investment possible - regular payments from nearly every household and business in the country, with easy ability to make predictions about current and future proceeds just by counting heads.

To be fair, MSFT was not started as a research company and is more of a mass market commercializer of existing technology. Bell Labs' primary goal was to discover new science and invent practical applications. (Reminds me I should go read "The Idea Factory"! (story of bell labs))

IMO new breakthroughs in our understanding of physics would be needed first to make substantial progress in QC. As long as MSFT isn't investing in attosecond lasers or low temperature experiments, RSA will remain secure.

Agreed wholesale. Any QC announcement that does not include replicable benchmarks for progress executing Shor or Grover (or demonstration of another real-world use-case that they actually address) should be dismissed out-of-hand by everyone except other researchers in QC.

All the best,

For me it was more than my first scan. I understand the word is Majorana, but when I go to pronounce it or read it, my brain reports back "Major-auwana."

The people who signed off on this name a) do a lot of drugs or b) didn't notice because they have never come anywhere near weed

> Very high performance ...

From the user's perspective, of course.

Argghhhh.

I rue the day that I decided to play the game of "What word is Majorana 1 similar to?"

Cuz, and I know the armchair psychoanalysts will have a field day, this is what my mind pieced together...

    Major ana*1  (remove the asterisk and treat the one like an ell)

Now I can't unsee it. Sigh.

This is the reason why is called like that. Is pronounced Ma-y-orana

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ettore_Majorana

I read "Majorana 1 aquarium processor". I am not high.

Hah, I read it as "Manjaro" at first glance.

Might be a more truthful name honestly too