Microsoft revealed Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits. This revolutionary chip, developed by Microsoft’s Quantum Hardware team, marks a significant leap toward that practical quantum computing company CEO Satya Nadella has been droning on about for the past nine years.
Majorana 1 is built using a breakthrough class of materials called topoconductors, which enable the creation of topological superconductivity—a new state of matter that was previously only theoretical. The processor is designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip, a milestone that could transform science and society.
Our solution to this measurement challenge works as follows (also see Figure 1):
- We use digital switches to couple both ends of the nanowire to a quantum dot, which is a tiny semiconductor device that can store electrical charge.
- This connection increases the dot’s ability to hold charge. Crucially, the exact increase depends on the parity of the nanowire.
- We measure this change using microwaves. The dot’s ability to hold charge determines how the microwaves reflect off the quantum dot. As a result, they return carrying an imprint of the nanowire’s quantum state.
We designed our devices so these changes are large enough to measure reliably in a single shot. Our initial measurements had an error probability of 1%, and we’ve identified clear paths to significantly reduce this.
Our system shows impressive stability. External energy—such as electromagnetic radiation—can break Cooper pairs, creating unpaired electrons that can flip the qubit’s state from even to odd parity. However, our results show that this is rare, occurring only once per millisecond on average. This indicates that the shielding that envelops our processor is effective at keeping such radiation out. We are exploring ways to reduce this even further.
Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft, explained that the new qubit design is small, fast, and digitally controlled, making it more stable and reliable than traditional qubits. This stability is crucial for quantum error correction, a key component in achieving large-scale quantum computing.
Microsoft’s announcement comes as part of the final phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program. The company aims to build a fault-tolerant prototype based on topological qubits within years, rather than decades.
The implications of Majorana 1 are vast, with potential applications ranging from self-healing materials to sustainable agriculture and safer chemical discovery.
