Microsoft’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough, Explained

A Microsoft research team claims to have built “the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits,” and that it is on track to build a prototype of a scalable quantum computer “in years, not decades.” If that weren’t enough, the company also said it had created in the process “a new state of matter”: a topoconductor. This was just days after Microsoft was chosen, along with quantum computing company PsiQuantum, by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop under-explored approaches to quantum computing, a field...