Why new qubit may give ultrafast quantum computing a boost
Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow and professor, University of California at Santa Barbara. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft Science & Tech Why new qubit may give ultrafast quantum computing a boost Microsoft discovery appears to be more stable, robust option Alvin Powell Harvard Staff Writer March 5, 2025 long read Microsoft announced last month it had created a “topological qubit,” which the company says can power a quantum computer more reliably than previously developed quantum qubits and which they believe will speed development of ultrafast quantum computers capable of tackling the toughest computing challenges, far beyond the capability of even supercomputers built through conventional means. The decades-old field of quantum computing seeks to harness the unusual forces at play at the subatomic level. Key is the idea of “superposition,” that something can be in two states at once. In classical computing, information is stored as bits, either a 1 or a 0. In quantum computing, superposition means that information...