{"id":414776,"date":"2018-04-01T08:23:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-01T08:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=414776"},"modified":"2018-04-01T08:23:04","modified_gmt":"2018-04-01T08:23:04","slug":"microsoft-gambles-quantum-leap-computing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2018\/04\/microsoft-gambles-quantum-leap-computing\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft gambles on a quantum leap in computing"},"content":{"rendered":"
In a laboratory in Copenhagen, scientists believe they are on the verge of a breakthrough that could transform computing.<\/p>\n
A team combining Microsoft researchers and Niels Bohr Institute academics is confident that it has found the key to creating a quantum computer.<\/p>\n
If they are right, then Microsoft will leap to the front of a race that has a tremendous prize – the power to solve problems that are beyond conventional computers.<\/p>\n
In the lab are a series of white cylinders, which are fridges, cooled almost to absolute zero as part of the process of creating a qubit, the building block of a quantum computer.<\/p>\n
“This is colder than deep space, it may be the coldest place in the universe,” Prof Charlie Marcus tells me.<\/p>\n
The team he leads is working in collaboration with other labs in the Netherlands, Australia and the United States in Microsoft’s quantum research programme.<\/p>\n
Right now, they are behind in the race – the likes of Google, IBM and a Silicon Valley start-up called Rigetti have already shown they can build systems with as many as 50 qubits. Microsoft has yet to demonstrate – in public at least – that it can build one.<\/p>\n
But these scientists are going down a different route from their rivals, trying to create qubits using a subatomic particle, whose existence was first suggested back in the 1930s by an Italian physicist Ettore Majorana.<\/p>\n