{"id":5376,"date":"2021-03-10T16:29:51","date_gmt":"2021-03-10T22:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=5376"},"modified":"2021-03-12T15:25:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T21:25:35","slug":"sayonara-majorana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=5376","title":{"rendered":"Sayonara Majorana?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Many of you have surely already<\/a> seen<\/a> the news that the Kouwenhoven group in Delft—which in 2018 published a paper in Nature<\/em> claiming to have detected Majorana particles<\/a>, a type of nonabelian anyon<\/a>—have retracted the paper<\/a> and apologized for “insufficient scientific rigour.” This work was considered one of the linchpins of Microsoft’s experimental effort toward building topological quantum computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like most quantum computing theorists, I guess, I’m thrilled if Majorana particles can be created using existing technology, I’m sad if they can’t be, but I don’t have any special investment in or knowledge of the topic, beyond what I read in the news or hear from colleagues. Certainly Majorana particles seem neither necessary nor sufficient for building a scalable quantum computer, although they’d be a step forward for the topological approach to QC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purpose of this post is to invite informed scientific discussion<\/em> of the relevant issues—first and foremost so that I can learn something, and second so that my readers can! I’d be especially interested to understand:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Weren’t there, like, several other<\/em> claims to have produced Majoranas? What of those then?<\/li>
  2. If, today, no one has convincingly demonstrated the existence of Majoranas, then do people think it more likely that they were produced but not detected, or that they weren’t even produced?<\/li>
  3. How credible are the explanations as to what went wrong?<\/li>
  4. Are there any broader implications for the prospects of topological QC, or Microsoft’s path to topological QC, or was this just an isolated mistake?<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Many of you have surely already seen the news that the Kouwenhoven group in Delft—which in 2018 published a paper in Nature claiming to have detected Majorana particles, a type of nonabelian anyon—have retracted the paper and apologized for “insufficient scientific rigour.” This work was considered one of the linchpins of Microsoft’s experimental effort toward […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quantum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5376"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5385,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5376\/revisions\/5385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}