A team led by Microsoft of physicists portrayed a 2018 high-profile article that the company presented as a major breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer, a device that promises a vast new computing power by exploring quantum mechanics.
The collected article came from a laboratory headed by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven, from Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. He claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles, long theorized, but never conclusively detected. The elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing hardware, which lags behind others like IBM and Google.
WIRED reported last month that other physicists questioned the discovery after receiving more complete data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov, from the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, from the University of New South Wales, Australia, said it appeared that the data that cast doubt on Majorana’s claim were withheld.
On Monday, the original authors published a note of retraction in the prestigious magazine. Nature, who published the previous article, admitting that the whistleblowers were right. The data was “corrected unnecessarily”, he says. The note also says that the repetition of the experiment revealed a calibration error that distorted all the original data, making Majorana’s sighting a mirage. “We apologize to the community for the insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript,” wrote the researchers.
Frolov and Mourik’s concerns also sparked an investigation in Delft, which on Monday released a report by four physicists not involved in the project. He concludes that the researchers did not intend to deceive, but were “caught up in the excitement of the moment” and selected data that fit their own hopes for a major discovery. The report summarizes this breach of scientific method standards with a quote from the Nobel Prize in Physics Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you shouldn’t be wrong – and you are the easiest person to be wrong”.
Delft’s lab released raw data from its 2018 experiment on Monday. Frolov and Mourik say they must also release complete data from their hunting project in Majorana, which dates back to 2010, for others to analyze.
In a note, Lieven Vandersypen, scientific director of the quantum research center in Delft, called the retraction of the article “a setback” and said that “reflection on the methods used must now take its course in the scientific community”. The center will continue to collaborate with Microsoft.
In a statement, Microsoft’s vice president of 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 developing quantum computers.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Nature said that the newspaper aims to quickly update the scientific record when published results are questioned, but that “these issues are often complex and, as a result, it may take time for editors and authors to fully uncover them”.
No one seems close to building a quantum computer complex enough to do useful work, but in recent years big companies like Google and IBM, and some startups, have demonstrated impressive prototypes. Microsoft took a different approach, claiming that, once it controlled Majoranas, it could create practical quantum hardware faster than its rivals because the technology would be more reliable. The company has been working on its independent quantum project since 2004. He brought Kouwenhoven to the team in 2016, after he obtained encouraging results in his laboratory with support from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s Majorana mess adds a new chapter to the particle myth, named after Italian theorist Ettore Majorana. He formulated the hypothesis in 1937 that there should be subatomic particles that are his own antiparticles, but they seemed to disappear at the beginning of the following year after boarding a ship.
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