Majorana qubits explained: The Quantum Kid goes inside Microsoft’s quantum lab

Insider brief

• The Quantum Kid, produced by Tesseract Quantum, has released a new episode filmed inside Microsoft’s quantum lab in Lyngby, Denmark, produced in collaboration with Microsoft.
• Lauri Sainiemi, Vice President of Fabrication at Microsoft Quantum, takes 10-year-old Kai through the full process of making a Majorana chip, from atom-by-atom materials growth to the clean room and the cryostats.
• The episode explains Microsoft’s bet on topological qubits, an approach designed to protect quantum information from errors at the hardware level.
• The Quantum Kid has more than 120,000 subscribers on YouTube and is a partner of The Quantum Insider.

What happens when you zip a 10-year-old into a full clean room suit and walk him into one of the most advanced quantum labs in Europe?

In the newest episode of The Quantum Kid, Kai gets to find out. He spent a day at Microsoft’s quantum lab in Lyngby, just outside Copenhagen. It’s Microsoft’s largest quantum site, and the place where the heart of its Majorana chips is made. The question he went to answer is a big one: how do you build a qubit that protects itself from errors?

A particle, a mystery and a qubit

The story starts in 1937, when Italian physicist Ettore Majorana predicted a particle that is its own antiparticle. A year later, he boarded a ferry from Palermo to Naples and vanished. What happened to him is still a mystery.