A team led by Microsoft of physicists has retracted a high-profile 2018 paper that the company presented as a major breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer, a device that promises tremendous new computing power by leveraging quantum mechanics.
The withdrawn paper came from a laboratory led by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles long theorized but never definitively discovered. The elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing hardware, lagging behind that of others, such as IBM and Google.
WIRED reported last month that other physicists had questioned the discovery after receiving more extensive data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov of the University of Pittsburgh and Vincent Mourik of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said it seemed like data raising doubts about the Majorana claim was withheld.
On Monday, the original authors published a withdrawal note in the prestigious journal Nature, who published the earlier article, admitted that the whistleblowers were right. Data was “corrected unnecessarily,” it says. The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed a wrong calibration error that skewed all of the original data, turning the Majorana’s observation into a mirage. “We apologize to the community for insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript,” the researchers wrote.
Frolov and Mourik’s concerns also led to a study in Delft, which published a report on Monday from four physicists who were not involved in the project. It concludes that the researchers had no intention of misleading, but “got caught up in the excitement of the moment,” and selected data that matched their own hopes for an important discovery. The report summarizes that violation of the norms of the scientific method with a quote from physics Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you shouldn’t fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool yourself. “
The Delft lab released raw data from its 2018 experiment on Monday. Frolov and Mourik say it should also release full data from its Majorana hunting project up to 2010 for others to analyze.
In a statement, Lieven Vandersypen, a scientific director of the Delft quantum research center, called the paper’s withdrawal “a setback” and said that “reflection on the methods used should now take place within the scientific community.” The center will continue to work with Microsoft.
In a statement, Microsoft’s vice president for quantum computing, Zulfi Alam, called the authors’ handling of the incident “an excellent example of the scientific process at work” and said the company remains confident in its approach to development. of quantum computers.
In a statement, a spokesman says Nature said the journal strives to update the scientific record quickly when the published results are called into question, but that “these issues are often complex and therefore it may take time for editors and authors to fully unravel them.”
No one seems close to building a quantum computing complex enough to do useful work, but in recent years, big companies like Google and IBM, and some startups, have been showcasing impressive prototypes. Microsoft took a different approach, claiming that once it used Majorana’s, it could make practical quantum hardware faster than rivals because the technology would be more reliable. The company has been working on its quirky quantum project since 2004. It hired Kouwenhoven in 2016 after achieving encouraging results in its lab with support from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Majorana mess adds a new chapter to the particle mythos, named after Italian theorist Ettore Majorana. He hypothesized in 1937 that subatomic particles should exist that are their own anti-particles, but that seemed to disappear the following year after boarding a ship.
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