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Quantum Campus shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 2,000 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.
Microsoft Majorana
Microsoft released details on its Majorana 2 chip this week. The company claimed a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds for the superconducting technology, putting “the team on a path to achieve a scalable quantum computer that is commercially valuable by 2029.” It also released Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI-based research and development platform that the team said sped the work on the chip.
Read the whitepaper on Majorana 2. Read the announcement from Microsoft.
As with last year’s Majorana announcement by Microsoft, outside researchers were skeptical. But notably, major outlets like Reuters, BBC, and Scientific American all quoted the same two — the University of Pittsburgh’s Sergey Frolov and the University of St. Andrews’ Henry Legg.
Jason Zander, executive vice president at Microsoft, responded in Reuters with "We've done enough of the physics to really have great data. Believe me, I would not spend the money on the engineering if I felt like we were still off on the physics."
Science’s article also offered a concise description of the chip’s “byzantine design:”
“On a chip made up of semiconducting layers, they lay down a strip of superconducting metal, which induces a wirelike region of superconductivity in the underlying semiconductor. Electrons pair up in this region, and a tiny electrode called a quantum dot can inject an additional, unpaired electron…The state with no lone electron signifies 0, and the state with one signifies 1. Microsoft researchers read out the states by measuring the wire’s capacitance with another nearby quantum dot.
In theory, quantum effects should make those states particularly robust. Weirdly, the lone electron is delocalized so it exists at every location along the wire at once, making it harder to disturb. In addition, the unusual shape of the quantum state describing a pair of electrons reduces the chances a pair will interact with its environment — the topological aspect of the device.”
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Goldstone modes
Condensed matter physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara directly observed Goldstone modes for the first time. They produced these spinless bosons in twisted tungsten diselenide moiré superlattices and watched them using a space-and-time-resolved ultrafast imaging technique.
This work was published in Nature Physics.
Granular superconductivity
A team from the University of Chicago and Penn State found hidden order within a mosaic of superconducting “puddles” in heavily boron doped diamond thin-films, showing what they call granular superconductivity that connects the puddles and allows electricity to flow without resistance. The mosaic is tunable by magnetic field, electrical current, and temperature changes.
“This offers a new way of thinking by integrating superconducting and semiconductor behavior to create opportunities for multifunction quantum devices,” said U Chicago’s David Awschalom. “Imagine a future technology that combines light, spin, superconductivity, and magnetism, all in a single material that one could also integrate with today’s microelectronics. There’s enormous potential at the interface between these nominally disparate areas of science.”
This work was published in PNAS.
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