Microsoft's claims on quantum computing technology: Physicists express doubts about the evidence
Microsoft's claims on quantum computing technology: Physicists express doubts about the evidence
anaheim, California
A Microsoft researcher presented the results behind the controversial assertion The company that it created the first "topological" qubits in the past month-a long target of quantum computing technology.
in front of a fully occupied room during a meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), Chetan Nayak, a theoretical physicist who leads the quantum computing project of Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, leads how the company develops topological quants that could be the building blocks for a noise-resistant quantum computer.
However,physicists in the audience expressed concerns whether Microsoft actually produced the first topological qubits. "It's a difficult problem," says Ali Yazdani, an experimental physicist at Princeton University in New Jersey. To everyone who tries to develop topological qubits, he says: "Good luck."
"It was a nice lecture," says Daniel Loss, a theorist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. But he expressed concerns about the strong claims and the relatively missing evidence. "People have exaggerated and the community is dissatisfied. They exaggerated it," he says.
Nayak admits the criticism: "I have never had the feeling that there would be a moment in which everyone is completely convinced," he adds, emphasizing that Microsoft is convinced of his understanding of the devices and that other researchers are enthusiastic about work.
The much expected APS presentation was hotly debated in physicist circles. Microsoft announced on February 19 that it was created by the first topological quBITs has . However, some physicists were not sure whether this claim would exist , since there was no examined scientific paper that supports this. (Microsoft published a work in nature at the same time, which described a method for reading future topological quBITs, instead of proving their existence 1 ).
The physicist Henry Legg from the University of St Andrews, UK, then put further doubts about Microsoft's claim in a report on the Preprint server Arxiv, which was published before the peer review, by using weaknesses in a test that the company used to verify its quantum computing devices 2 . LEGG presented these results on Monday at the APS conference.
In his current lecture, Nayak showed a scheme for Microsoft's qubits: it is microscopic, H-shaped aluminum wires that are assembled on indium arsenide, a superconductor at ultra-talent temperatures. The devices are designed to use majoranas, the previously unknown "quasi particles" that are essential for the functioning of topological qubits. The goal is that the majoranas appear on the four tips of the H-shaped wire and emerge from the collective behavior of the electrons. These majoranas could theoretically be used to carry out quantum calculations that are resistant to loss of information.The new data presented Nayak consisted mainly of "X" and "Z" measurements of the qubits, which are vertical and horizontal probes along the H-shaped wire. When Nayak showed the data for the X measurement, he admitted that the characteristic bimodal signal was difficult to recognize due to electrical disorders.
eun-AH Kim, a theorist at Cornell University in IThaca, New York, therefore questioned the robustness of the X measurement. "I would like to see that bimmodality is easily recognizable in future experiments," she told Nature.
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Microsoft Azure Quantum. Nature 638, 651–655 (2025).
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Legg, H. F. Preprint at arxiv https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2502.19560 (2025).
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aghaee, M. et al. Phys. Rev. B 107, 245423 (2023).