With dozens of companies, from small startups to tech giants, pursuing quantum computing, there’s a steady flow of results as they try to find a path to utility. We typically focus on yeni technologies and major landmarks, which can obscure the fact that any big success will inevitably have been built on a lot of incremental progress.<\/p>\n
The past few weeks have seen a number of companies release progress reports on how they’re trying to get the technologies closer to general use. None of these represents a major breakthrough, but all are absolutely necessary for the technology to advance. The idea here is to convey the hard work required to move us closer to something useful.<\/p>\n
Microsoft is one of the few companies working on topological qubits, based on the distinct physics that occurs when particles are confined. Microsoft’s system relies on a thin superconducting wire placed on top of a semiconductor. In superconductors, groups of two electrons form Cooper pairs. But if the wire contains an odd number of conducting electrons\u2014meaning there’s a single unpaired electron\u2014it will end up delocalized to both ends of the wire. (Because quantum mechanics is weird.)<\/p>\n