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Majorana 2 Under the Microscope: Quantum Leaps & Ocean Data Loss
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Microsoft's Majorana 2 chip claims a thousand-fold qubit stability leap — but peer review hasn't landed yet. Plus quantum error correction advances, photon teleportation over open air, and the shutdown of a $368M ocean monitoring network.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Microsoft is claiming its new quantum chip holds qubit states for over twenty seconds. Some qubits in the Majorana 2 chip are holding for sixty.
While Microsoft dominates the headlines, the less glamorous work happening elsewhere is arguably just as important for understanding where quantum computing actually stands. Atom Computing demonstrated a technique that kept logical qubits stable through ninety consecutive error-correction rounds.
Separate from quantum computing entirely, a team teleported the polarization state of a photon between two quantum dots across two hundred and seventy meters of open air. The fidelity was eighty-two percent.
One development that deserves more attention than it's getting: the Trump administration has announced the shutdown of the Ocean Observatories Initiative within fifteen months. That's a three hundred and sixty-eight million dollar network of nine hundred instruments monitoring deep-sea currents, ocean acidification, and AMOC.
Finally, astronomers have confirmed a closely orbiting pair of supermassive black holes in the Markarian five hundred and one galaxy. Twenty-three years of radio data, an orbital period of one hundred and twenty-one days, and a projected merger within one hundred years.
The thread across this episode is verification. Microsoft's stability claims need peer review before they become the architecture story they're being framed as.
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