Physicists are mostly unconvinced by Microsoft’s new topological quantum chip

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At the world’s largest gathering of physicists, a talk about Microsoft’s claimed new type of quantum computing chip was perhaps the main attraction. 

Microsoft’s February announcement of a chip containing the first topological quantum bits, or qubits, has ignited heated blowback in the physics community. The discovery was announced by press release, without publicly shared data backing it up. A concurrent paper in Nature fell short of demonstrating a topological qubit. Microsoft researcher Chetan Nayak, a coauthor on that paper, promised to provide solid evidence during his March 18 talk at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit.

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