Microsoft has revealed that it could bring reliable quantum computing within years instead of decades.
The tech giant is working on a new state of matter that isn't a solid, liquid or gas.
It's a next-level chip that Microsoft believes is as big of a breakthrough as semiconductors - that powers today's smartphones, computers and electronics.
The chip is powered by the world’s first topoconductor, which could finally make quantum computers stable and small enough to fit on a single chip, per a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature.
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Quantum computers are often called the future of technology because they can solve exceptionally complex problems that today’s computers can’t handle.
The computers could tackle global challenges such as microplastic pollution. According to one study, quantum computers and AI can be combined to 'design new peptides capable of capturing microplastics.'
Additionally, these computers can be adapted to create self-healing materials for construction and healthcare, optimise logistics supply chains and crack encryption codes.
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If all goes well, Paul Stevenson, a professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said Microsoft could be 'very serious competitors' in the race to build the first reliable quantum computers.
“The new papers are a significant step," he said, "but as with much promising work in quantum computing, the next steps are difficult and until the next steps have been achieved, it is too soon to be anything more than cautiously optimistic."
George Booth, a professor of theoretical physics at King’s College London, said the research represented an 'impressive technical achievement,' but said we won’t know its true impact until later.
“Whether a claim of ‘years’ is accurate will remain to be seen,” he stated.
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The corporation claims that the topoconductor could lead to quantum computers with a million qubits - the tiny building blocks that are similar to the ones and zeros in current computers.
Earlier this month, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) chose Microsoft’s topoconductor as one of two potential paths to developing a practical quantum computer by 2033 - much faster than experts originally expected.
The competitor in the race is PsiQuantum, which is taking a different approach by using silicon-based photonics instead of electrons.
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While companies like Google and IBM have already built early quantum machines, Microsoft has been playing the long game, 'focused on the long game,' Booth reported, 'by working on a system which is inherently more resilient to noise and interference.'
He added: “These topological qubits protect the information they carry by using the properties of a new type of emergent particle, a Majorana fermion, which means that it is harder for this information to be lost as it is processed.
"However, [there is an] added layer of complexity when constructing these qubits when compared to competing architectures."
Though the research has shown huge progress, Microsoft still has a long way to go before the technology can be considered for scale-up.