insiderblmA Microsoft-led team has withdrawn a controversial research paper into quantum computing, published in 2018.
The research claimed to have found evidence of an elusive subatomic particle Microsoft suggested could help the development of more powerful computers.
But it now says mistakes were made.
The journal Nature has published a retraction. And the paper’s authors have apologised for “insufficient scientific rigour”.
But the company has said it remains confident of its wider efforts on quantum computing.
Leap forward
The paper had been hailed as a breakthrough.
But some scientists remained sceptical.
Quantum computing has been seen as a potentially revolutionary leap forward, promising to complete some tasks much faster.
In classical computers, the unit of information, or “bit”, can have a value of either one or nought.
Its equivalent in a quantum system – the quantum bit (qubit) – can be both at the same time, opening the door for multiple calculations to be performed simultaneously.
But scientists have struggled to build working devices with enough qubits to make them competitive with conventional types of computer.
‘Incredibly exciting’
Many large technology companies, including IBM and Google, as well as smaller rivals such as D-Wave and IonQ are also working on the problem.
But Microsoft proposed a different route – trying to create qubits with the properties of Majorana particles, whose existence was first suggested in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, which it said would make them less error prone.
And the 2018 paper claimed to have observed evidence supporting Majorana particles’ existence.
“It is a profoundly more exotic challenge than what is going on with other approaches to quantum computing,” Prof Charlie Marcus, one of the researchers on the project, told BBC News in 2018.
But even then, other scientists were cautionary.
“It is one of those things that on paper look incredibly exciting,” University College London’s Prof John Morton said.
“But physics has a habit of throwing up spanners in the works.
And now, the researchers have accepted they were wrong.
Their errors included:
- having “unnecessarily corrected” some of the data and not having made this clear
- mislabelling a graph, making it misleading
“We can therefore no longer claim the observation of a quantised Majorana conductance and wish to retract this,” they wrote in Nature.
An independent review of the original paper found no intentional misrepresentation of the data.
