2025-02-23
Thanks to Majorana 1, a new research paper has been published with the answer that many physicists were trying to find for almost 20 years. Not only the possibility of creating (a thing that was only theorized by Ettore Majorana, famous Italian physicist) a new state of matter, but also using that same new state to build a brand new quantum computer that is able to decrease significantly the number of errors in quantum measurements and calculations.
The study of Quantum Mechanics (and Quantum Computing) has always been a fascinating topic for me. The idea of a computer that can solve problems that are impossible for classical computers to solve is just mind-blowing. But the problem with quantum computers is that they are really hard to build and to maintain. The qubits are really fragile and they can be easily affected by the environment. This is the reason why quantum computers are not yet a thing and most of the scientists and computer scientists were skeptical about the usage of actual quantum properties in computing. Quantum Computers didn’t really have the possibility of making actual useful calculations because of the high error rate that the qubits had. Some time ago, Google created a quantum chip (Willow) that you could hold in the palm of your hand that was able to solve problems that a classical computer would have taken more than the age of the universe to solve. But the problem was that the quantum chip was not able to solve the problem without errors. The error rate was too high to be considered useful. But Google was not the only one who is trying to make breakthroughs in quantum computing. China developed a record-breaking 504-qubit quantum computer powered by the Xiaohong chip.
You know, all this great utopia that physicists and scientists keep blabbering about which is the “Quantum Supremacy” is still far from being a thing. Most of the great things it comes with will surely create a lot of problems and issues that we are not yet able to solve if not with the right measures.
This is where Majorana 1 comes into play. The newly published research shows the first practical evidence of Majorana zero modes, a concept Ettore Majorana theorized almost a century ago. These exotic quasiparticles have a unique property: they are their own antiparticles. Unlike electrons or photons, which have a distinct opposite, Majorana modes are fundamentally symmetrical.
Why does this matter? Because they allow the creation of topologically protected qubits that are not as fragile as the traditional ones. Instead of being easily disturbed by temperature, noise, or tiny environmental fluctuations, these qubits are intertwined into a topological structure that makes errors far less likely. Imagine tying a knot into a rope: no matter how much you shake the rope, the knot stays. In simpler words, that’s what is happening here—but in the strange world of quantum mechanics.
This is a huge deal because the main bottleneck in quantum computing has never been about raw processing power, but about error correction. Traditional qubits need entire armies of other qubits just to keep themselves in check. A single logical qubit might need hundreds of physical qubits to work reliably. With Majorana-based qubits, the overhead for error correction could shrink dramatically, opening the door for practical, large-scale quantum machines.
For decades, the idea of stabilizing Majorana states was thought to be almost impossible. Countless papers proposed setups with nanowires, superconductors, and exotic materials, but none really nailed it in a reproducible way. Now, with Majorana 1, a joint effort between European and American labs, physicists have finally demonstrated stable braiding of these quasiparticles—something that was only simulated in theory until now.
The research community is calling this a paradigm shift. Not only is there a new “state of matter” in the lab, but this state can be harnessed to build quantum hardware that may leapfrog everything we’ve seen so far. If superconducting qubits (like the ones used by Google and IBM) were the first chapter of the story, Majorana qubits might very well be the sequel that everyone was waiting for.
If the claims hold true, we are looking at a world where quantum computing might finally step outside of the laboratory and into industry. Financial modeling, cryptography, AI optimization, climate simulation—these are all fields where today’s best supercomputers still struggle, and where a stable, error-resistant quantum computer could be revolutionary.
But let’s not get too carried away just yet. This is still early-stage research. Building a prototype with a handful of stable qubits is very different from scaling up to thousands or millions of them. Even so, the fact that we now have a concrete physical foundation for error-resistant qubits is something that makes the future of quantum computing look a lot less like science fiction and more like an engineering challenge.
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