Title: Majorana 1 Explained: The Path to a Million Qubits
Author: Microsoft

Transcript:
[MUSIC]
What would the world look
like with a computer that could
accurately model the laws of nature?
That's the promise of quantum computing,
but there have always been limitations.
Now, as one of our longest
running research projects,
our team at Microsoft
has been able to take
a subatomic particle that has only been
theorized until now,
and not only observe it, but control it.
Creating an entirely new material and
a new architecture for quantum computing.
One that can scale to
millions of qubits on a single chip.
This is not a work of science,
it's a book of science and art.
I got to be honest, some of these ideas
are a little science fiction sounding.
It will solve problems unsolvable by
the combined power of all
the world's compute today,
and promises to
revolutionize fields such as medicine,
material science, and our understanding
of the natural world.
Our first quantum processor based on
this architecture is the Majorana 1.
[MUSIC]
I've always been fascinated
with puzzles and challenges,
and a mixture of
mathematics and computers.
When I learned that there's this type of
computer that didn't exist yet,
but could solve problems that we couldn't
solve with our digital,
all of the computers we had,
I was just fascinated.
I wanted to learn, well,
how can I help that computer be built?
Over the years, I ran
into problems that could not
solve on the most powerful computers.
But then over time, I realized, hey,
I could solve that if I
had a quantum computer.
A laptop can solve a
problem of 10 electrons.
A supercomputer can solve
a problem of 20 electrons.
But no classical computer in
the world can exactly solve
the behavior of 30 or 40 or 50 electrons.
The number 30, 40, 50 electrons,
those numbers are seemingly small,
but require up to lifetime in the
universe time scales to
solve with all of the world's
computers operating together.
That's until you have a
scaled quantum computer
that can solve these
problems efficiently.
These calculations
are so complicated that
if the classical computer was
as big as this entire planet,
it would still not be able to compute it,
just to give you a constructive scale.
And a quantum computer can do it,
and can do it very, very well.
At the core of a quantum
computer are these qubits.
Qubits are like our
classical bits, right?
These are essentially
zeros and ones in a transistor.
And we need the analog of
that in quantum computing.
The analog is a qubit, a quantum bit,
that serves as that
core information unit.
It's where we store the information,
and then we process on those
qubits to create computation,
and ultimately get solutions back out.
Now there's many different
ways, right, to create a qubit.
The reason quantum computing
has been so slow to progress
is that the industry has
been struggling with problems
making qubits reliable
and resistant to noise.
Progress has been incremental.
The challenge is,
qubits are actually
pretty delicate in general.
So you need underlying
qubits that are really stable.
But you don't want
that to come at a cost,
because you don't want
your underlying qubits
to be really big.
That's one way to make it more stable
is have them really big.
But if they're really big,
and you're still gonna need many of them,
then how are you gonna fit
them all into your system?
You don't wanna deal with something the
size of a warehouse.
Then the second thing is
you don't want the qubits
to end up being slow, right?
Because if the price you pay
for getting something stable
is you have to go really slowly,
then a computation that
might take you a month
ends up taking your decade.
And that's not, then it's not useful.
People, early days of
computation, used vacuum tubes.
And then that technology,
actually you could build
very good computers with it.
And then the transistor was invented.
And the earliest transistors
weren't necessarily that great,
but it became clear over time
as the transistor developed
and the integrated circuit developed,
that this was gonna be the
technology of the future.
In that spirit that the first generation
of qubits may not be what
gets us to the next stage
where we can really
solve the kind of problems
I was mentioning that
are really important.
And so we might need to invent a material
and therefore a quantum processing unit
that has the right properties.
So for us, we want something that
has some built-in
level of error protection.
And a lot of those
ideas actually were explored
in the context of software, of quantum
error correcting codes,
but you can actually build a lot of those
ideas into hardware.
So the way you design that qubit matters.
We see the states of matter every day.
Solids keep their shape,
liquids vary but keep their volume,
gases expand to fill
the space they're in.
All defined ultimately
by how their atoms behave.
But what if there were more?
What if under the right conditions,
you could engineer more?
States that have only
ever been theorized,
that would change how
subatomic particles actually behave?
A hundred years ago,
mathematicians predicted
one such new state of matter,
the topological state.
And since then,
researchers have been looking
for a very specific, very
useful quasi particle within it,
the Majorana particle.
Last year, we were able to
observe it for the first time.
And this year, we're able to control it
and use its unique
properties to build a topoconductor,
a new type of semiconductor
that operates also as a superconductor.
With this material,
we can build a whole new
foundational architecture
for our quantum
computers, a topological core,
allowing us to scale to not tens
or hundreds of qubits on a chip,
but millions, all in
the palm of your hand.
Majorana's theory showed that
mathematically it's possible
to have a particle that
is its own antiparticle.
That means you can take
two of these particles
and you bring them together,
and they could annihilate
and there's nothing left.
Or you could take two
particles and you bring them together
and you just have two particles.
Sometimes it's nothing, the zero state,
and sometimes it's the
electron, the one state.
So it really has taken
quite some thinking, right?
Some time to design a
device, design a chip
that can enable measurement
of this literally elusive particle.
We've designed a chip
that is able to measure
the presence of Majorana.
Majorana allows us to
create a topological qubit.
A topological qubit is
reliable, small, and controllable.
This solves the noise problem that
creates errors in qubits.
Now that we have
these topological qubits,
we're able to build an entirely new
quantum architecture,
the topological core, which can scale
to a million
topological qubits on a tiny chip.
Every single atom in this
chip is placed purposefully.
It is constructed from ground up.
It is entirely a new state of matter.
Think of us as building the picture
by painting it atom by atom.
In a regular chip, the computation is
done using electrons.
We don't use electrons for compute.
We use Majoranas for computing.
It's an entirely new particle.
It's half electron.
When we look at the design of this chip,
first of all, you can fit so much
on just a small form factor.
This chip can store
over a million qubits.
Over a million can fit on
just this small form factor.
In addition, we don't
want to wait centuries
or millennia for a solution.
And so this chip also
offers the right speed
to get solutions from the chip
in a reasonable,
efficient amount of time.
That's the beauty in this qubit design,
the topological qubit.
It has the right size, the right speed,
and the right type of controllability.
And all of that together means
that it has an ability
to scale like no other.
The way the system that we are constructing works
is you have the quantum accelerator.
You have a classical
machine that works with it
and controls it.
And then you have the application
that essentially goes
between classical and quantum
depending on which
problem it's trying to solve.
Once the computations are done,
the results are
re-synthesized on the classical side
and produced back to the
user as one complete answer.
Where the quantum machine shines,
it is able to do simulations,
particularly in chemistry and materials,
that are extremely accurate,
as accurate as an
actual rec lab experiment.
Imagine a world where
a scientist computes
the material that they want,
and they compute it to the accuracy
that it's first time right.
So when you walk into a lab,
you don't need to experiment anymore.
Imagine a battery that you charge at once
and you never have to worry about.
You don't have to
worry about discharging.
What can you do with a million qubits?
In the last few years,
there's an explosion of artificial
intelligence, right?
Copilot.
And what's so inspiring
about a quantum computer
is that with a quantum computer
augmenting the AI capability,
it can help more, you know,
drive even more discovery.
What makes me excited
about quantum computing
is that it will give us the tool
to tackle many of these challenges
at the fundamental level
by creating new chemicals,
new drugs, new
enzymes for food production.
Honestly, it's kind of
mind-blowing right now
because this is something
we've thought about for a while,
years or more.
(dramatic music)
We call the ages of mankind by materials.
We've talked about the stone age.
We've talked about the
bronze age and the iron age.
The steel age, the silicon age, materials
define our culture, define our mankind,
define our progress.
Thus, what could be more
powerful than having a machine
that can let you radically change the way
we work with materials?
Our leadership has been
working on this program
for the last 17 years.
It is the longest running research
program in the company.
And after 17 years, when we are
showcasing our results,
we are showcasing results
that are not just incredible,
They're real.
(dramatic music)
They are real because they will
fundamentally redefine
how the next stage of the
quantum journey takes place.
We're at the cusp of a quantum age
and Majorana 1 is just the beginning.
(dramatic music)