Stefan Mileschin

Turns out the truth cat was dead and not alive

A Microsoft-led team of physicists has retracted a high-profile 2018 paper that the company touted as a key breakthrough in the creation of a practical quantum computer.

The retracted paper came from a lab headed by Microsoft physicist Leo Kouwenhoven at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. It claimed to have found evidence of Majorana particles, long theorized but never conclusively detected.

The elusive entities are at the heart of Microsoft's approach to quantum computing hardware, which lags behind that of others such as IBM and Google.

However other physicists had questioned the discovery after receiving fuller data from the Delft team. Sergey Frolov, from the University of Pittsburgh, and Vincent Mourik, at University of New South Wales, in Australia, said it appeared that data that cast doubt on the Majorana claim was withheld.

Now the authors published a retraction note in the prestigious journal Nature, which published the earlier paper, admitting the whistleblowers were right.

Data was "unnecessarily corrected", it says. The note also says that repeating the experiment revealed a miscalibration error that skewed all the original data, making the Majorana sighting a mirage.

"We apologize to the community for insufficient scientific rigor in our original manuscript", the researchers wrote.

https://fudzilla.com/news/52489-micr...echanics-paper