The News
Microsoft said Wednesday it had created a new state of matter that is not a solid, liquid, or gas, as it unveiled a powerful new chip that marks the latest development in the quest to create quantum computers.
The company is hailing the chip, called Majorana 1, as a milestone toward building a super-powerful quantum computer — machines that rely on particle physics to solve problems beyond the scope of ordinary computers. Its CEO said the chip could pave the way for solving problems that " all the computers on Earth today combined could not."
The Majorana 1 chip was powered by a new type of material which it described as "the world's first topoconductor " to help produce fewer error-prone qubits — the building blocks for quantum computers — than rivals like Google's Willow chip .
Scientists were more cautious: "You have to verify… that a device behaves in all the magical ways that theory predicts it should; otherwise, the reality may turn out to be less rosy for quantum computing," one physicist told The New York Times.
