Microsoft Advances Towards Quantum Supremacy with Milestone Achievements

Microsoft Quantum researchers have achieved a first milestone toward creating a reliable and practical quantum computer by engineering a new way to represent a logical qubit with hardware stability. The device can reportedly induce a phase of matter characterized by Majorana zero modes, and has demonstrated low enough disorder to pass the topological gap protocol, proving the technology is viable. Microsoft has also created a new measure to gauge the performance of a quantum supercomputer: reliable quantum operations per second (rQOPS), with a minimum requirement of 1 million rQOPS for a machine to qualify as a quantum supercomputer.