Comment by radioactivist
3 days ago
A few things to keep in mind, given how hard of a media push this is being given (which should immediately set off alarm bells in your head that this might be bullshit)
- Topological phases of matter (similar, but not identical to the one discussed here) have been known for decades and were first observed experimentally in the 1980s.
- Creating Majorana quasiparticles has a long history of false starts and retracted claims (discovery of Majoranas in related systems was announced in 2012 and 2018 and both were since retracted).
- The quoted Nature paper is about measurements on one qubit. One. Not 100, not 1000, a single qubit.
- Unless they think they can scale this up really quickly it seems like its a very long (or perhaps non-existent) road to 10^6 qubits.
- If they could scale it up so quickly, it would have been way more convincing to wait a bit (0-2 years) and show a 100 or 1000 qubit machine that would be comparable to efforts from Google, IBM, etc (which have their own problems).
The claim/hope is that topological qubits are fault tolerant or at least suffer from much lower errors (very roughly you can think of topological qubits as an error correction code built of the atoms, ie on scale of Avogadro's number). If, for example they could build a single qubit even with 10^-6 error rates that would in fact put them __ahead__ of all other attempts at the path to fault tolerance (but no NISQ).
It is unfortunately unclear how good the topological qubits practically are.
I understand the claim and what they are trying to do (and they've been trying to do it for 20 years now). It's an interesting approach and it is orthogonal enough from other efforts that it is absolutely worthwhile to pursue scientifically (I'm in an adjacent field in condensed matter physics).
But they are doing a full court press in the media (professionally produced talking head videos, NYT articles/other media, etc, etc) claiming all of those things you've just said are right around the corner. And that's going to confuse and mislead the public. So there needs to push back on what I think is clear bullshit/spin by a company trying to sell itself using this development.
That's fair, and I don't like their marketing too (and others too, look how the reviewers pushed back on misleading claims in the paper). I was talking specifically on Majoranas being behind sc/trapped ions/cold atoms. If they manage to make 1 and 2 qubit gates and it will have good error rates in couple of years (and that's a big if), they'll be approximately where for example Google is expected to be. And the question what will be easier to scale is very unclear and will decide who wins eventually