By Tom Dotan

A Microsoft executive made a compelling pitch to mountaineer and physics professor Chetan Nayak in 2000: Join the Redmond, Wash., company and together they would scale nearby Mount Rainier -- and build a quantum computer.

He summited Washington's highest peak within two years. But the climb toward a workable quantum device continues.

Nearly all major tech companies are working to build a practical quantum computer, which they hope will enable leaps forward in fields such as encryption and medicine. Rather than using classical bits that are either zero or one, quantum computing employs a type of bit known as a qubit that can exist in both states at the same time. This helps qubits to process more information than today's computers and to perform certain calculations exponentially faster.

Nayak leads a team at Microsoft that consists of several hundred chemists, engineers and mathematicians who have been trying to build a quantum computer for about 20 years. The group, called Station Q, is taking an approach that is riskier and less widely accepted than approaches employed at rivals such as Alphabet's Google.

If it pays off, Microsoft could vault to the front of the industry and disprove numerous doubters in the tech industry and scientific community.

Last month, Microsoft announced that it had created a chip capable of producing a long-elusive particle known as a Majorana that could form the basis for a useful quantum computer, a breakthrough they said could shorten the arrival of a quantum device to years, rather than decades.

While some physicists expressed doubt that Microsoft's claims would survive their scrutiny, Chief Executive Satya Nadella appeared thrilled to have something to show the world. Microsoft spends some $300 million annually on quantum research, according to a person familiar with the matter. While tiny compared with its investments in projects such as artificial intelligence, the spending on Microsoft's quantum efforts has piled up over two decades with little to show until now.

Such progress is a stark change from seven years ago, when Nadella dismissed the company's quantum efforts internally as research with no commercial potential, according to someone who viewed an email he sent at the time.

Nayak, 53, describes his quantum research as years of incremental progress punctuated by eureka moments that get the world's attention, like the Majorana announcement. Then it is back to the grind.

"It's just really, really hard to explain this any other way other than us being on the right track," he said.

Nayak communicates daily with colleagues in his Santa Barbara, Calif., lab, as well as in Redmond and Europe. They are keenly aware they are in a race. Google made its own announcement of a quantum-computing advance using a different approach than Microsoft's in December as did a company called D-Wave Quantum this month.

Hooked on quantum

Nayak's fascination with quantum physics started early, when he was a junior at the Manhattan science magnet Stuyvesant High School, when a teacher gave him a copy of a book of lectures by the legendary physicist Richard Feynman.

Quantum physics dates to the early 20th century and challenges the traditional understanding of reality by positing that particles can exist in multiple places simultaneously and influence each other instantaneously across vast distances.

Some executives at Microsoft and other tech companies have been predicting that a useful quantum computer powered by qubits would be commercially available in the next few years for at least a decade.

The problem has been reliability. All computer chips make errors, but on the ones in today's PCs and smartphones, the error rates are minimal. On qubits, the slightest disturbance can cause them to make a cascading series of mistakes.

Under Nayak, Microsoft is tackling the problem with something called a topological superconductor. In it, a single electron is essentially spread across a tiny wire cooled to near absolute zero temperatures. Smearing that electron would form a Majorana particle, which has properties that can be used to make a qubit.

Microsoft contended in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature last month that it had identified a Majorana and measured the information in it.

Qubit controversy

Critics in the world of quantum physics say the Microsoft researchers' claims that they observed a Majorana particle are a mirage.

"Chetan Nayak is running a fraudulent project within Microsoft," said Sergey Frolov, a quantum researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. He pointed to a number of alleged discrepancies in the published data that would materially change the outcome of their claims.

Jason Zander, the Microsoft executive who oversees Station Q, said he was confident Nayak's science would stand. The company is set to publish follow-ups to the Nature paper, which an independent set of researchers are reviewing. A Microsoft spokesman said the company holds itself to the highest ethical standards.

In 2021, two papers in Nature based on research partly funded by Microsoft about building Majorana particles were retracted because of questions about the validity of the research. Microsoft executives said the research wasn't done by Station Q, but rather a Dutch lab to which the company had ties.

Now that Microsoft says it has shown off a Majorana, Nayak is focused on making the qubits even more reliable and adding more to the chip.

Nayak said he doesn't want to still be working for Microsoft, trying to build a stable qubit chip, in his 70s. And he could finally put an end to the digs he gets from his three children, the oldest of whom was born around the time he joined Microsoft.

"Every time I say you haven't cleaned your room yet, they say, 'Well look, you haven't built a quantum computer yet,'" Nayak said.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 16, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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