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eigenket 2 days ago

The Majorana particles in Microsoft's set-up are "quasi-particles". They aren't really fundamental particles, but excitations in the system which behave (roughly, in some appropriate sense) like particles. They aren't neutrinos.

blablabla123 2 days ago | parent [-]

Quite confusing though

> “There’s no slam dunk to know immediately from the experiment” that the qubits are made of topological states, says Simon. (A claim of having created Majorana states made by a Microsoft-funded team based in Delft, The Netherlands, was retracted in 2021.) The ultimate proof will come if the devices perform as expected once they are scaled up, he adds.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00527-z

eigenket 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not sure what that has to do with my previous comment but yeah, pushing the boundaries of science is kinda difficult and you can make mistakes.

My understanding is that they pretty convincingly showed that the thing they built acts as a qubit. This means that if its not doing what they think its doing (the "topological" / Majorana stuff) then they accidentally made a qubit which works some other way. That isn't outside the realm of possibility but it is fairly unlikely.