Did you know Microsoft made a new state of matter? Yes they did and it’s called a topological superconductor. A topological superconductor is a superconductor, like the one in your smartphone, but made out of indium arsinide. Indium arsenide is a type of indium, but it has the special property to make nano wires when electro-magnitized. What are nano wires you might ask, well there are tiny wires only a few atoms thick, that can send information from one q-bit to the next in less than a nanosecond. Microsoft used this to make a microchip, the Majorana 1, that could store more that 1 million q-bits! Imagine that! Your phone probably has ten thousand q-bits, but this super computer, it had 1 million. It connected 2 q-bits together so if one broke the other one would keep its information, resulting in hundreds less bugs.
To make this crazy super computer microsoft took a bunch of indium arsinide, aluminum, and tungsten. Stacked them when they were only a few atoms thick, and electromagnetized it. Then they made some nanowires that connected the qubits and made the normal supercomputer, and bam! A topological supercomputer capable of loading five hundred thousand frames per second.
Microsoft is only experimenting with this new type of quantum computer but it soon could become the usual. It is really cool how Microsoft is making a new state of matter! Microsoft might take over the world one day, but at least we’ll be living with insane supercomputers.
