{"id":286351,"date":"2026-07-01T09:26:53","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=286351"},"modified":"2026-07-01T09:27:02","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T14:27:02","slug":"is-there-a-new-quantum-processor-or-is-microsoft-lying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2026\/07\/01\/is-there-a-new-quantum-processor-or-is-microsoft-lying\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a new quantum processor or is Microsoft lying?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’ve been writing a lot about artificial intelligence lately, and I wanted to break that cycle by writing about something that’s been bugging me for a little while now: namely, the controversy over Microsoft’s claim that it has<\/a> developed a new and improved version of a quantum microprocessor based on the theoretical “Majorana” particle. What is said particle, you ask? I am not a quantum physicist by any means (I don’t even play one on TV) but I believe it is technically known as a fermion<\/a> — a class of sub-atomic particles that obey certain rules. Protons and electrons are types of fermion, and so are quarks and weirder things like leptons (but not bosons). The main feature of a Majorana particle is that it acts as its own anti-particle. In regular physics, every particle has an anti-particle<\/a> with the same mass but the opposite charge (except for photons, which are their own anti-particle because their magnetic charge is zero and the opposite of zero is still zero). When a particle and its anti-particle meet, they annihilate each other<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In case you were wondering (as I was), the Majorana particle is named after a brilliant Italian physicist named Ettore Majorana, who was born in 1906 and did ground-breaking work on theoretical physics; Enrico Fermi\u00a0compared him to Isaac Newton. He correctly predicted the existence of the neutron, which won its discoverer the Nobel Prize, but in 1938, he disappeared mysteriously<\/a>. Majorana was a public supporter of Italian fascism and a member of the\u00a0National Fascist Party, but at the time he disappeared the Italian government had started requiring all university professors to swear an oath of loyalty to the Fascist regime in order to keep their jobs. It’s possible he didn’t want to do this and went into hiding but there is no record of anything written by him after his disappearance, and some colleagues suspect he committed suicide<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How does any of this relate to Microsoft’s quantum processor? Great question. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of the particle’s behavior I am completely out of my depth, so I’m going to defer to Wikipedia’s description<\/a> of how Majorana particles could emerge, and also how they can (theoretically) be used in quantum computing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In\u00a0superconducting materials, a\u00a0quasiparticle\u00a0can emerge as a Majorana fermion, more commonly referred to as a\u00a0Bogoliubov quasiparticle\u00a0in\u00a0condensed matter physics. Its existence becomes possible because a quasiparticle in a superconductor is its own antiparticle. Majorana fermions can be bound to a defect at zero energy, and then the combined objects are called Majorana bound states. This name is more appropriate than Majorana fermion because the statistics of these objects is no longer\u00a0fermionic. Instead, they are an example of\u00a0non-abelian anyons: interchanging them changes the state of the system in a way that depends only on the order in which the exchange was performed. The non-abelian statistics that they possess allows them to be used as a building block for a\u00a0topological quantum computer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can\u00a0see other issues\u00a0and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It’s important to note that the existence of a Majorana particle is still theoretical — no one has conclusively proven that they exist. So how can Microsoft claim that it has created not just one processor based on such a particle, but two? The latest announcement was that the second iteration of the Majorana processor is a “thousand times more reliable”<\/a> than the first version. In addition to this massive improvement in reliability, Microsoft says the chip has a “mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute.” A qubit is the fundamental unit of quantum computing, which exists in a state of quantum superposition, representing both a one and a zero (an “on” and “off” state) simultaneously. Some popular explanations of<\/a> this ability like to compare traditional bits in a computer to coins lying flat on a table — with either heads showing or tails showing — while qubits are like a coin that is spinning on its edge, able to suddenly become either heads or tails (or in quantum terms, to simultaneously be both at once).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headline goes here<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As I undertand it, most normal quantum computers — if there is such a thing — use these quantum particles by freezing them in place in “ion traps” that create fences formed by electromagnetic fields. But these kinds of systems are very brittle, since the tiniest disturbance can cause quantum states to collapse<\/a>, and this creates errors in quantum calculations. In a so-called “topological” quantum computer of the kind Microsoft is trying to build, quasi-particles intertwine to form a kind of braid in three-dimensional spacetime, and these braids<\/a> are much more stable and therefore not as prone to error. Some research shows that the kinds of “anyons” required for this type of computer can be created using semiconductors\u00a0made of\u00a0gallium arsenide\u00a0at a temperature of nearly\u00a0absolute zero\u00a0and subject to the presence of strong\u00a0magnetic fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what, I can hear you thinking. I don’t know or care what anyons are, or how gallium arsenide works. Me neither! The interesting part of this story for me is that Microsoft — a company that has a market value of $2.7 trillion<\/em> and almost single-handedly created the personal computing industry — has repeatedly claimed<\/a> that its Majorana processor uses these particles, and that its new version is a thousand times more reliable, and yet some other theoretical physicists have called BS on these claims, not once but several times. In other words, Microsoft keeps putting out<\/a> press releases saying it has done this, and that it will build a working quantum computer using said particles within the next three years, and a number of prominent members of the industry keep saying<\/a> that the company and its research scientists are full of you-know-what. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, Dr. Henry Legg is a physicist and lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and has been a long-term critics of Microsoft’s claims relating to quantum processing. The company’s latest paper (which has yet to be peer-reviewed) contains “nothing that shows that this is a qubit,\u201d he told Nature<\/em> magazine<\/a>. Legg also wrote a peer-reviewed paper criticizing<\/a> the company’s work, in which he said: “Last year, Microsoft claimed they had built the equivalent of a precision Swiss watch. However when I opened the case to examine the mechanism, I found what looked like a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts. Something was making noise, but it didn’t look like the breakthrough Microsoft had claimed.” Vincent Mourik, an experimental physicist in Germany, called it<\/a> \u201canother step in Microsoft’s almost decade-long track record of publishing unreliable results.” Wait, what? A decade of doing this? Indeed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2021, researchers funded by the company were forced to retract<\/a> a previous Nature<\/em> paper that was published in 2018 and claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles. The authors of that paper eventually apologised for their work having \u201cinsufficient scientific rigour,\u201d and stated that<\/a> “we can therefore no longer claim the observation of a quantised Majorana conductance.” Microsoft eventually developed a tool called the Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) that was supposed to test the particles and processes in question and prevent false positives, but Legg’s paper says in a nutshell<\/a> that the protocol is flawed and can’t reliably do what it was supposed to do. Among other things, he says the company’s software is bug-riddled and therefore doesn’t work very well, and the company also presented only the favourable outcomes of the protocol in their paper. Contradictory results were reportedly not shown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Headline goes here<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

According to Legg, his skepticism about Microsoft’s claims is shared by most theoretical physicists: “Despite the headlines, the vast majority of scientists in the field were sceptical of Microsoft\u2019s claim from the start,” he wrote<\/a>. “My critique simply backs up that scepticism in the scientific record.\u201d In his paper, Legg also accused Microsoft of not sharing enough data for other scientists to scrutinize and prove or disprove the company’s work (for its part, Microsoft said it is sharing all of its data with the US defence agency DARPA for independent arbitration, but that some of it is too commercially sensitive to be made public). “Last year they claimed to be years, not decades from a ‘topological quantum supercomputer,'” Legg told\u00a0The Register<\/em><\/a>\u00a0tech-news website in an email. “My feeling is that they are centuries, not decades away. If it works at all — and, based on what I have seen, the most likely scenario is that it doesn’t work.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Microsoft’s initial claim that it had built a Majorana-particle based qubit, Legg and Mourik were not the only ones to criticize its claims: Sergey Frolov, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh in the US, took to YouTube<\/a>\u00a0to criticize what he called \u201cdistractions caused by unreliable scientific claims from Microsoft Quantum.\u201d The Majorana-particle based processor, he told The Register<\/em><\/a>, is “a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established. So this is a pretty big problem.” Frolov said that there was “just absolutely no way” that the qubit Microsoft was describing could work the way the company said it did because doing so would require Majorana particles, and they hadn’t proven that they even exist, let alone that they can be harnessed in that way. “If all your Majorana results are scrutinized and criticized, there is just absolutely no way this is going to be a topological qubit. That leaves kind-of one option, that it’s \u2026 an unreliable presentation. And that’s why I say fraud because at this point I’m out of other words to use,” Frolov told the website<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assuming Microsoft’s critics are right in their appraisal of the company’s alleged quantum processor technology, why would the software giant keep pretending that it had done something that most physicists don’t believe it has done — why double down on these claims? Why not just say its researchers were working in a promising area, and be vague about what the results might be? I honestly don’t know. It’s worth noting that Microsoft is one of only two companies<\/a> that have advanced to the final phase of a program run by DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the same entity that originally funded the development of the internet. The program is known as the “Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing” program. According to descriptions<\/a> of the program, it uses experts from NASA, national labs like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and the Air Force Research Laboratory oversee and validate Microsoft’s data, as well as its hardware, architecture, and engineering plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, none of these entities have said anything publicly about Microsoft’s claims, or the work that supports them, and none have responded to any of the criticisms levelled by Legg or anyone else. Could those criticisms just be professional jealousy? Are other physicists just skeptical because they weren’t the ones to make the kinds of discoveries that Microsoft has? Possibly. Or maybe they are skeptical primarily because the company’s work is based on theoretical particles that were first described 90 years ago, and have never been shown to exist. The field of quantum physics is almost legendary for its unpredictability and even inscrutability, and for being based on the idea that some things can be in two different places (or states) at the same time — not to mention the idea that particles can be “quantum entangled<\/a>” and communicate information about their position across huge distances at a speed faster than light — so maybe Microsoft is just onto something that others aren’t? Perhaps. Or it’s full of you-know-what.<\/p>\n

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Microsoft keeps claiming that it has built a processor around a theoretical quantum particle, and physicists keep saying it is full of you-know-what<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":286354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/81b4362d-8ea8-4d52-9c46-4fd1003eb8a1_1536x1214.webp?fit=1456%2C1151&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286351"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":286355,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286351\/revisions\/286355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}