HN Reader

money quote:

  "if Microsoft’s claim stands, then topological qubits have finally reached some sort of parity with where more traditional qubits were 20-30 years ago. I.e., the non-topological approaches like superconducting, trapped-ion, and neutral-atom have an absolutely massive head start: there, Google, IBM, Quantinuum, QuEra, and other companies now routinely do experiments with dozens or even hundreds of entangled qubits, and thousands of two-qubit gates. Topological qubits can win if, and only if, they turn out to be so much more reliable that they leapfrog the earlier approaches—sort of like the transistor did to the vacuum tube and electromechanical relay. Whether that will happen is still an open question, to put it extremely mildly."

A very important statement is in the peer review file that everyone should read:

"The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices. The work is published for introducing a device architecture that might enable fusion experiments using future Majorana zero modes."

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...

I think what many people are missing in the discussion here is that topological qbits are essentially a different type of component. This is analogous to relay-triode-transistor technology progression.

It is speculation still whether the top-q approach will be effective, but there are significant implications if it is. Scalability, reliability, and speed are all significant aspects on the table here.

While other technologies have a significant head start, much of the “head start” is transferrable knowledge, similar to the relay-triode-transistor-integrated circuit progression. Each new component type multiplies the effectiveness of the advances made by the previous generation of technologies, it doesn’t start over.

IF the topological qubits can be made to be reliable and they live up to their scalability promises, it COULD be a revolutionary step, enabling exponential gains in cost, scalability, and capability. IF.

Recent and related:

Microsoft unveils Majorana 1 quantum processor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43104071 - Feb 2025 (150 comments)

topological analytics shows that under like-like exchanges multiple distinct pathways exist in 2D (in 3D topology does not have distinct pathways for these exchanges). this permits real anyon particles to exist when the physics is confined to 2D within quantum limits such as in a layer of graphene. certain configurations of layers (“moire materials”) can be made periodic to provide a suitable scale lattice for anyons to localize and adopt particular quantum states

anyons lie somewhere between fermions and bosons in their state occupancy and statistics - no 2 fermions may occupy the same state, bosons can all occupy the same state, anyons follow rational number patterns eg up to 2 anyons can occupy 3 states

I remain curious if you can actually calculate anything with these gadgets? I mean can it add 2 and 2 or work out the factors of 30 or anything?

A bit off topic - I really like Scott Aaronson and his blog, but hate the comment section - he engages a lot with the comments (which is great!) but it's really hard to follow, as each comment is presented as a new message.

I made this small silly chrome extension to re-structure the comments to a more readable format - if anyone is interested

https://github.com/eliovi/shtetl-comment-optimized

I wonder if this means that ai will have more capabilities with quantum computing.

So far, I haven't read how those chips are programmed, but it seems like it requires to re learn almost everything.

I don't even know if there is an OS for those.

We should celebrate this for what it is: another brick in the wall that we’re building to achieve practical quantum computing systems.

Other than fast factorization and linear search, is there anything that Quantum Computing can do? Those do seem important, but limited in scope - is this a solution in search of a problem?

I've heard it could get us very accurate high-detail physics simulations, which has potential, but don't know if that's legit or marketing BS.

I had a thought while reading this:

Are we, in fact, in the very early stages of gradient descent toward what I want to call "software defined matter?"

If we're learning to make programmable quantum physics experiments and use them to do work, what is that the very beginning of? Imagine, say, 300 years from now.

This seems quite a bold claim that Microsoft proofed that Neutrinos are Majorana particles...

I enjoy the quality of "it's too early to say" in Aaronson's writing. It won't stop share price movement or hopeless optimism amongst others.

I do wonder if he is running a simple 1st order differential on his own beliefs. He certainly has the chops here, and self introspection on the trajectory of highs and lows and the trends would interest me.

Hey anyons 2D electron gas. Wrote about it a while ago and get downvoted!