Microsoft's new quantum chip promises faster problem-solving

Microsoft says its new quantum chip is vastly more reliable than its previous version, paving the way for a quantum computer solving commercially useful problems within three years.

At the heart of quantum computing are qubits, which offer the promise of answering questions that defeat today's machines, but are notoriously delicate and unstable.

Microsoft says the qubits on Majorana 2, its new chip, survive for an average of 20 seconds, rather than the milliseconds of Majorana 1.

That means the new chip is 1,000 times more reliable - an improvement in performance the tech giant compares to the difference between a phone that needs charging every day to one which needs charging every few years.

That would still require huge further advances as such a device would require millions of qubits - the current chip, Alam said, has 12.

Assessing the firm's claims are difficult because it does not release the full details of what it has discovered publicly, citing commercial confidentiality.

There is a worldwide race to develop the technology, given its potential to take on tasks currently considered too enormous for even the most powerful traditional computers.

The firm's approach to this is based on exploiting the properties of a so-called quasi-particle, which had existed only in theory, since it was first predicted in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana.

To do this it had to exploit a novel state of matter - different from the three familiar states of liquid, solid or gas.

Paul Stevenson, a physics professor at the University of Surrey, said the tech giant's timeline sounded plausible - if its research lived up to its claims.

"If they succeed, they will leap from being a player with no production quantum computer, to being a serious player in the race to make the next generation of fault-tolerant machines."

It was forced to retract a paper published in the journal Nature in 2018 in which it claimed to have found evidence for the Majorana.

Henry Legg, a physicist at the university of St Andrews, told the BBC at the time that in his opinion Microsoft's quantum research had "moved firmly away from science and entered the realm of faith".

"We really look to scientific rigor. We welcome the debate that has always been part of physics... the key thing I would tell people, go read the papers and look what's there, go talk to the experts that we have given deep information to."

Microsoft is part of the final stage of a quantum development programme run by the US defence research agency Darpa which aims to "verify and validate the firm's utility-scale quantum computer concept" and says it has shared all of its data and workings with it, including commercially sensitive material, for assessment.

But a paper its published alongside the announcement has not been peer reviewed - a process where it is reviewed by independent experts - and scientists the BBC spoke to wanted more information.

The second generation of the Majorana chip is based on the same principles as the first but is more effective in part because the scientists replaced aluminium with lead as a superconductor.

While the team is using AI to try to improve and speed up its efforts, Zander said it was human scientists who had come up with the idea of changing materials.

Microsoft's hoped-for timeline raises the possibility of its quantum computers taking on problems which could take decades to solve, such as getting rid of microplastics, or coming up with better fertilisers for food production.

"If you look at removing forever chemicals, getting rid of microplastics, things like that, those are things traditionally, if we take 15, 20, 30 years to figure out that's a very long time," he said.

"We want to compress that time cycle as much as possible, and so being able to have humans with AI move quicker and compress that timeframe, I think is actually great.

"So it's not about eliminating humans, it's about giving humans tools that can help them accelerate that process, that's actually going to help society, I think."

"We don't know what the limit [of classical computers] is," Sir Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google Deepmind, recently told author Sebastian Mallaby in the book The Infinity Mind.

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