In the July 21 2017 issue of the journal Science Qing Lin He reports he was able to move Majorana quasiparticles in a nanowire, their existence has been shown before but this is the first time they could be moved around. Majorana quasiparticles (sometimes called Anyons) should obey non-Abelian statistics, which just means its non-commutative. But that is a big deal because something like that would be ideal for use as the working material in a Quantum Computer because they would be far more resistant to quantum decoherence, the biggest enemy to practical quantum computing.
The amount of conductance a nanowire containing Anyons has comes in discrete jumps and is a function of the topological class (the number of times the spacetime worldlines of the Anyons cross over), and it's not easy to change the topological class of entangled Anyons, and that makes them resistant to quantum decoherence. As a example you probably can't change the topological class of your shoelaces (nerd-speak for untie your shoelaces) with just any old random bump, a much more intricate maneuver would be necessary. Another way of looking at it is that each Anyon is really only half a particle so a single Qbit of information is stored in both, so for a Qbit to be scrambled both Anyons would have to be hit at the same time, and they can be as far apart as you like. The next step is to get the Anyons to actually perform a calculation and so far none has even been able to add 1+1, however once that goal has been reached I think it would be possible to scale up to something far larger much more quickly than other approaches. This certainly isn't the only approach to Quantum Computing, instead of Anyons companies like IBM, and Google and D-wave are using other things like ions and photons and superconducting junctions, and unlike Anyons they have already been able to perform a few simple calculations. Only Microsoft is betting entirely on the more radical topological approach, time will tell which method is better but it would be ironic if a company with a reputation for being plodding ends up being the most innovative of all. At the very least you've got to give them credit for taking the coolest path, and it might be the most lucrative too, John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
