Skeptics chip away at the company’s claims in a long-running dispute over its Majorana chip program. Microsoft’s controversial claim that its Majorana chip program will make possible a scalable quantum computer by 2029 has been thrown into new doubt by a scientific paper that questions whether the company has correctly interpreted its own experimental evidence. According to a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Henry Legg from the University of St Andrews, published this week in Nature, Microsoft’s Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) framework, designed to infer the existence of quantum states in theorized Majorana particles, is flawed. “Last year Microsoft claimed they had built the equivalent of a precision Swiss watch. However, when I opened the case to examine the mechanism, I found what looked like a chaotic jumble of mismatched parts,” said Legg. He believed the results gathered from Microsoft’s TGP software data analysis could also be explained by other effects, as well as being skewed by the data chosen for analysis. Because of this, he believed the company’s researchers had jumped to the wrong conclusions. “Something was making noise, but it didn’t look like the breakthrough Microsoft had claimed. Despite the headlines, the vast majority of scientists in the field were skeptical of Microsoft’s claim from the start; my critique simply backs up that skepticism in the scientific record,” he said. Topological qubits The ability to create Majorana ‘zero modes’ that resist the errors suffered by traditional qubit-based designs is fundamental to Microsoft’s entire quantum computing strategy, stretching back two decades. This, of course, assumes the existence of subatomic Majorana fermions, named after the Italian physicist who first proposed them in 1937. To this day, they remain only theoretical. In 2018, Microsoft said its researchers had detected evidence of their existence, an apparently major breakthrough it was forced to retract