MAJORANA - SCI & TECH
News: Explained
| What is Microsoft’s planned ‘quantum supercomputer’?
What's in the news?
● In
a paper published on June 21, researchers at Microsoft announced that they had figured out a way to create an
elusive kind of particle that could potentially revolutionize quantum
computing.
Key takeaways:
● The
claim pertains to particles called Majorana zero modes, whose unique properties
could help build quantum computers that
are much less fragile than they are today, making them computationally
superior.
Majorana Zero Mode:
● Majorana
zero mode is a unique particle or
bound state that belongs to the class of
Majorana fermions.
● It
was first proposed by the Italian
physicist Ettore Majorana in 1937.
Unique characteristics:
● Majorana
zero modes are bound states of particles that are their own antiparticles (counterpart particle with opposite quantum
properties such as charge).
● This
distinguishes Majorana zero modes from other particles in the quantum realm.
Applications of Majorana Zero Mode:
1. Enhanced Stability:
● It
provides increased stability for qubits, the fundamental units of information
in quantum computing.
2. Qubits:
● Just
like bits (1 and 0) are the basic units by which computers process information,
‘qubits’ or ‘quantum bits’ are the units
of process by quantum computers.
● A
quantum computer stores information in the form of quantum bits (qubits) that
can take on various combinations of zero and one.
● Even
if one entity within the bound state is disturbed, the overall qubit remains
protected and retains encoded information.
3. Topological Quantum Computing:
● Majorana
zero modes enable topological quantum computing, utilizing non-Abelian
statistics.
● Non-Abelian
statistics introduce an additional
degree of freedom, allowing for different outcomes based on the order of
computational steps.
● It
provides enhanced stability for qubits in quantum computing.
Go back to basics:
Antiparticle:
● It
is a subatomic particle having the same
mass as a given particle but having an opposite
electric or magnetic property.
Fermion:
● All subatomic particles
that make up matter are called fermions.
● The
Dirac equation predicted the existence of an antiparticle for each particle,
such that if the two meet, they annihilate each other.
● Fermions which have their
own antiparticles are called Majorana fermions.