A team led by Microsoft of physicists withdrew a high-profile paper from 2018 that the company promoted as a key breakthrough in creating a practical quantum computer, a device that promises new computing power by achieving quantum mechanics.
The withdrawn paper came from a laboratory run by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He was alleged to have found evidence of Majorana particles, much theorized, but never definitively detected. Elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing hardware, which lags behind others such as IBM and Google.
WIRED reported last month that other physicists questioned the discovery after receiving more complete data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov of the University of Pittsburgh and Vincent Mourik of the University of New South Wales in Australia said it appeared that data questioning Majorana’s request had been withheld.
On Monday, the original authors published a note of withdrawal in the prestigious magazine The nature, which published the previous newspaper, acknowledging that the whistleblowers were right. The data was “unnecessarily corrected,” they say. The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed a miscalibration error that tilted all the original data, making Majorana’s observation a mirage. “We apologize to the community for the insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript,” the researchers wrote.
Frolov and Mourik’s concerns also sparked an investigation in Delft, which released a report on Monday from four physicists who were not involved in the project. The conclusion is that the researchers did not intend to mislead, but were “caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment” and selected data that fit their own hopes for a major discovery. The report summarizes the violation of the rules of the scientific method in a quote from the Nobel Prize in Physics, Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you should not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
The Delft lab released raw data from its 2018 experiment on Monday. Frolov and Mourik say they should also release full data on their Majorana hunting project, which dates back to 2010, for others to analyze.
In a statement, Lieven Vandersypen, scientific director at the Delft Quantum Research Center, called the withdrawal of the article “an obstacle” and said “reflection on the methods used must now take place in the scientific community.” The center will continue to work with Microsoft.
In a statement, Microsoft’s vice president of quantum computing, Zulfi Alam, described the way the authors approached the incident as “an excellent example of the scientific process in the workplace” and said the company remains confident in its approach to developing quantum computers. .
In a statement, a spokesman for The nature He said the journal aims to quickly update scientific evidence when published results are questioned, but that “these issues are often complex and may take time for publishers and authors to fully discover.”
No one seems to be building a quantum computer complex enough to do useful work, but in recent years large companies such as Google and IBM and some startups have demonstrated impressive prototypes. Microsoft took a different approach, arguing that once it used Majoranas, it could create quantum hardware virtually faster than rivals because the technology would be more reliable. The company has been working on its quantum maverick project since 2004. It brought Kouwenhoven to the staff in 2016, after achieving encouraging results in its laboratory with the support of Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Majorana mess adds a new chapter to the particle myth, named after Italian theorist Ettore Majorana. He hypothesized in 1937 that there should be subatomic particles that are their own antiparticles, but that seemed to disappear early the next year after they boarded a ship.
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