Drama over quantum computing’s future heats up

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On March 18th, Chetan Nayak, a physicist leading Microsoft’s quantum team, presented new data on the company’s quantum computing chip at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. It was meant to calm a raging debate among physicists, but researchers remain skeptical of the results. “I never felt like there would be one moment when everyone is fully convinced,” Nayak told Nature in a March 18th article. The controversy centers on Microsoft’s February claim that it had built a new type of quantum hardware — a topological qubit, made from a pattern of electrons on a tiny...