Microsoft closer to quantum computing based on elusive particle.
Microsoft announced a quantum-computing advancement today, a measurement that looks like an electron split in half in a piece of wire. It will be significant if the company wants to create a working quantum computer. Big companies like Intel, IBM, and Google have already built quantum computers with multiple qubits. It may appear that Microsoft is behind since it hasn't released one yet. But Microsoft is working on its own quantum computer that incorporates cutting edge physics to overcome the challenges of it's competitors. This could be a giant leap forward if it works.
Quantum computers are machines that use quantum theory, the physics of the smallest particles, to perform calculations almost impossible for regular computers. While Google has announced a 72 qubit quantum computer, it is imprecise. The smallest amount of energy from the outside environment could lead to an error in the calculation. But Microsoft's "topological" quantum computers might drastically reduce that noise. Its researchers are making some advances this year, including a paper published in Nature, and they think they'll have working qubits by the end of the year.
"One of our qubits will be as powerful as 1,000 or 10,000 of the noisier qubits," Microsoft's Julie Love, director of quantum computing business development, claims that one qubit will be as powerful as thousands of the interference proned qubits announced by it's competitors. Computers calculate with bits-two-state systems, like a light switch that can be either on or off. A quantum bit, or qubit, is the same, except the coin is flipping in a black box during the calculation. You're allowed to set some initial values on each side of the coin-complex numbers of the form a + bi like you learned about in high school that, when manipulated, output how likely the coin is to land on heads or tails. You only know the value of the coin when you open the box. Computation is done by putting several coins tied together in the box at the same time and interacting them in a way such that those initial values combine mathematically. The output relies on all of the coins, which makes certain combinations of heads or tails more likely and certain ones forbidden.
This system could lead to advanced chemistry simulations or artificial intelligence. But the key is finding a sort of quantum heads-and-tails system where the two states can form a superposition, entangle, and interfere. You also must find a system where the coins continue flipping even if you nudge the box, or find a way to build in redundancies to account for the nudges. Microsoft researchers think that the key to overcoming the nudging problem is a topological system. They are engineering systems that retain some qualities regardless of how you change them, these are so-called topological objects.
Microsoft specially fabricated piece of semiconducting wire made of indium antimonide, surrounded by superconducting aluminum. Cooling this wire to near-absolute zero in a magnetic field gives the electrons a collective behavior that forces certain electrical properties to take on discrete values. Microsoft has invested millions of dollars to discover new physics in highly engineered systems to get its quantum computers working. Microsoft doesn't have a working pair of interacting qubits yet, and it has been simultaneously working on hardware and a user-facing development kit with a programming language.
Microsoft is confident that if it gets everything up and running, it will be a giant leap in quantum computing and will be able to quickly catch up to competitors. "We have a stable qubit, more stable than the other guys'," said Love. "You can build a house out of bricks or two-by-fours, but that's not what we build skyscrapers out of. Our qubits are like steel."