Microsoft’s next-generation quantum chip is cutting the timeline for useful quantum computing

Microsoft claimed last year that it had done something A major breakthrough in quantum computing With Majorana 1, the company’s first quantum processor. While physicists Immediately skeptical According to Microsoft’s claims, the software giant today announces Majorana 2, its next-generation topological quantum chips.

Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing that is very similar to the binary bits computers use today, and which are 1,000 times more reliable, according to Microsoft. It’s a significant breakthrough that helps make quantum computing more reliable, thanks to the use of a new materials stack and some help from Microsoft Discovery’s AI agent.

“To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team enhanced Majorana 1’s material stack to create more
“The topologically stable phase,” explains Chetan Nayak, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the company’s vice president for quantum devices. “Majorana 2 replaces the superconductor Majorana 1, which is aluminum, lead, and
It also updates the active region of the semiconductor to a mixture of indium arsenide and indium arsenide
Antimonides.”

Improved materials mean better performance for qubits, according to Microsoft. “In the aluminum Majorana 1, the qubit lifetime was between one and 12 milliseconds, while in Majorana 2, the qubit lifetime exceeded 20 seconds, representing a stability improvement of more than 1,000 times,” says Nayak. The lifespan of some qubits now exceeds one minute, enough to convince Microsoft that it has made significant enough progress to promise useful quantum computing much sooner.

“Building on this rapid progress, we are accelerating our roadmap toward a practical and scalable quantum computer,” says Nayak. “We have halved our timeline and are now aiming to reach this goal by 2029.” Microsoft is building a prototype of a fault-tolerant quantum computer based on topological qubits, with the goal of quantum computing solving some of the world’s toughest problems.

Microsoft is now releasing Discovery, the app that helped improve its Majorana chips, to researchers today. Microsoft Discovery is designed to help apply agent workflows to research and development programs. It is now Available on GitHub Researchers can use a GitHub Copilot account to access it.