Comment on Microsoft announces quantum computing breakthrough with new Majorana 1 chip
archomrade@midwest.social 3 days ago
Microsoft isn’t using electrons for the compute in this new chip; it’s using the Majorana particle that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937.
Ok now i’m gonna need an explain-like-i’m-not-a-quantum-scientist on what a ‘topological transistor’ is, and what it uses instead of electrons for its compute (and, like, what is the significance?)
to most people (including myself, who did take college level modern physics. course), explaining the standard model of elementary particles, is way too high of a level regardless.
its like being given scifi names and terminology, and then suddenly finding out theyre real.
Lmao, yea I think they’re kind of playing a game with language here.
After doing some reading of various explanations, what they mean when they say they aren’t using electrons for computation is basically that the ‘thing’ they’re measuring that dictates the ‘state’ of the transistor is a quasi-particle… but that particle is only observed through the altered behavior of electrons (i guess in the case of the majorana particle, it appears as two electrons gathered together in synchrony?)
So the chip is still using electrons in its computation in the same say as a traditional transistor - you are still sending electrons into a circuit, and the ‘state’ of the bit is determined by the output signal. It’s just that, in this case, they’re looking for specific behavior of the electrons that indicate the presence and state of this ‘qbit’
That is just my layman’s understanding of it
qbits in general yes. with traditional computing, a state is either on (powered) or off(unpowered). the fundamental idea of quantum physics, but also quantum computing, is that there are other aspects of an electron that can be measured and changed. which direction it spins, its offset, what direction its poles are etc.
with more different “states” that an electron can be in that can be measured, you can get that many times more data, per electron.
so in laymans terms when comparing it to a lightbulb, at a given moment in time you not only care about if the light is off or on, but what color it is, what brightness it is, how hot it is, if its making a noise, what shape its making. fundamentally speaking, having more states means you can describe something faster since youre sending out more measurable data at once.
This is the best description of a quantum computing ive ever read.
So much of modern tech is just misusing words they heard from sci-fi stuff that was already misusing words they heard in physics class.
L0rdMathias@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Oh man I’ll try, but I can’t make any promises …
Modern particle physics breaks particles down into two groups: Dice that are weighted (bosons) and Dice that aren’t weighted but also aren’t fair (fermions).
Bosons always roll the same number, because they’re weighted.
Fermions always roll numbers, but we have no clue how many sides they have, or what numbers they can even roll because they change each time we roll them.
Classical Computers ignore this problem. They just count the number of dice they have, and are really really good at rolling precise amounts of dice and putting them into specific labelled jars. Their math works by carefully keeping these jars organized, and are limited by how quickly and accurately the CPU can organize amounts of dice.
It turns out if you roll a set of dice enough times, no matter what set of dice you use as long as they are random, you eventually wind up with a similar looking “standard distribution” of probabilities. Quantum computers let us zero out the dice to a fixed starting position, kind of like zeroing out a scale, and then we can use that to make calculations. This process is very sensitive and difficult and has a lot of scaling issues.
Enter Anti-Dice. Anti-Dice are the polar opposites of existing Dice. They are just like all the other particles but they have their numbers printed upside down, and their shapes are inverted.
A Majorana particle is a particle that takes this metaphor even Further BEYOND!!! It is a type of Fermion (dice that we can roll and will give us random numbers instead of the same number each time), but whenever we roll a Majorana particle it turns into its own Anti-Dice. This is a really cool concept that Microsoft is using here as a proof of concept to make a quantum computer that is easier to scale up, because now if we roll say a bunch of 6s and a bunch of -6s, we know it’s actually supposed to be the same number because of how Majorana particles are defined, and we can theoretically use this cheaper and easier method to scale up a quantum chip.