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“Usually when that happens in condensed matter physics, the physical realization is not far behind. “The physics behind the creation of Majoranas is well understood theoretically,” said Frolov during an online discussion. Yet despite this problem, even the field’s critics find the science too promising to ignore.
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“I’ve become concerned that, after a series of false starts, a significant fraction of the Majorana field is fooling itself,” Frolov wrote in a commentary in Nature in April. The quantum rules that lead to MZM quasiparticles also allow the creation of other weird quantum states - states that mimic Majorana particles but can’t be used as the basis for a quantum computer.īecause of these and other hurdles, the field of topological quantum computing has entered a period of self-reflection, if not outright crisis.
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The retraction, along with other recent high-profile examples of related work that fell apart under closer inspection, has exposed an additional challenge at the heart of topological quantum computing research: Not only is it extremely difficult to build a topological qubit, but no one is sure how to even spot one. “It was an unfortunate incident of overzealousness combined with being careless,” said Patrick Lee, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the committee. “The research program the authors set out on is particularly vulnerable to self-deception, and the authors did not guard against this,” the authors of the report wrote. The authors had simply fooled themselves by zooming in only on the results that showed them what they hoped to see. The investigation concluded that there was no evidence of fraudulent data fabrication or manipulation. The incident triggered an investigation by an independent committee. The group wrote in their retraction that they could “no longer claim the observation of a quantized Majorana conductance.” They added an apology “for insufficient scientific rigour in our original manuscript.” In March 2021, at Kouwenhoven’s request, Nature retracted the paper.
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That October the duo asked Kouwenhoven’s group for their raw data, and in December they found some odd inconsistencies: It looked as though some of the plots had been manipulated, and the paper’s claims weren’t borne out when the full range of measurements was taken into account.įaced with these problems, Kouwenhoven’s group replotted their data and found the conclusions no longer stood up. (Both Frolov and Mourik are former members of Kouwenhoven’s group.) Frolov and Mourik found they couldn’t reproduce the Delft results. Later that year, Sergey Frolov, a physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, and his collaborator Vincent Mourik of the University of New South Wales in Australia were doing similar work in their own labs. In 2019, Microsoft opened its own quantum laboratory on the Delft campus, with Kouwenhoven as its director. Their paper was heralded, with much press fanfare, as the dawn of topological quantum computing. A team led by Leo Kouwenhoven, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said that they had found the definitive signature of MZM quasiparticles in indium antimonide nanowires. That’s one reason why the 2018 Nature paper garnered so much attention. Microsoft, for one, is staking its main quantum computing strategy on topological qubits. These “topological” qubits are extremely difficult to build, but despite the technical challenges, some researchers are convinced that they are the only path to building a useful quantum computer with many hundreds or thousands of qubits. An MZM qubit can no more suffer a random error than you can separate the links of a chain without cutting them - the basic principles of topology, the mathematics of shape, protects against it. But if the qubits could be made from strange configurations of electrons with the exotic name of Majorana zero-mode (MZM) quasiparticles, errors simply couldn’t occur. Existing quantum computers are notoriously fragile, their quantum bits - qubits - prone to incurring random errors. In 2018, researchers at the forefront of an entirely new approach to building quantum computers published, in the journal Nature, what looked to be a landmark achievement.
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