2025-02-23
Thanks to Majorana 1, a new research paper has been published with the answer that many physicist where 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 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) is 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 scientist and computer scientist were skeptical about the usage of actual quantum properties in computing. Quantum Computers didn’t really had the possibility of making actual useful calcutions 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 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 record-breaking 504-qubit quantum computer powered by 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.