Controversial Quantum-Computing Paper Will get a Hefty Correction

A key research claiming to offer proof of Majorana quasiparticles has acquired an in depth correction 5 years after it was revealed within the journal Science. Two researchers who flagged the paper as problematic say that the correction isn’t ample — triggering the most recent dispute in a field dogged by controversy.

For many years, physicists have been compelled by the concept that ultracold electrons in microscopic units may behave collectively to kind quasiparticles immune to noise — each environmental perturbations and the inherent atomic jostling that plagues all quantum techniques. The resilience of those Majoranas may make them ultimate candidates for forming qubits, the informational items in quantum computer systems which are analogous to bits in classical machines. Studies to show their existence have come up quick, though latest daring claims by expertise big Microsoft have drawn considerable scrutiny.

In September 2018, a staff led by Charlie Marcus, a physicist on the University of Copenhagen, who additionally labored for Microsoft on the time, posted a manuscript to the preprint server arXiv that described a contemporary method to generate Majoranas. The researchers made nanowires of indium arsenide surrounded by a shell of aluminium. Applying a small magnetic area, they then measured electrical alerts “consistent” with pairs of Majoranas, one at both finish of every wire. A yr and a half later, they included theoretical simulations to justify their outcomes, and the research was revealed in Science.

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Two physicists — Sergey Frolov, on the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and Vincent Mourik, now on the Research Centre Jülich in Germany — raised questions in regards to the validity of the information, and in July 2021, Science applied an editorial expression of concern to the paper to warn readers of potential issues. Now, Science is lifting that warning, and the authors are issuing a 20-page correction to the paper’s supplementary materials. News of the correction was first reported on 31 July by the technology news site The Register.

The authors say they’re relieved by the end result. “It’s not really correcting any errors,” says co-author Saulius Vaitiekėnas, a physicist on the University of Copenhagen. “We are summarizing and providing additional information.” Frolov, then again, argues that the information within the paper don’t give a full image of electron behaviour within the staff’s units and requires retraction. “I do not trust this data,” he says.

Jake Yeston, an editor at Science who oversees physical-sciences submissions, says that the journal determined to not retract the paper as a result of there was not a “clear, community-grounded view that it’s obviously wrong”. But, Yeston says, the lack of know-how within the authentic paper was an issue, and it has now been mounted. “It shouldn’t be that a reader who wants to know what your protocol was has to go to your lab and talk to you,” he says. “That should be in the paper.”

Questioning the information

Thirteen years in the past, Frolov and Mourik had been authors on a special research in Science that reported proof for Majoranas. But pleasure across the outcome light after researchers found that different mundane phenomena may mimic the quasiparticles.

When the Copenhagen staff’s manuscript was posted to arXiv in 2018, Frolov and Mourik had been doubtful so that they requested to see all the information. E-mails reviewed by Nature present that the Copenhagen group launched extra information in November 2020. The pair of critics analysed the data offered and concluded that the information had been incomplete and contradicted the research’s central claims. An inside inquiry by the college’s physics institute, nevertheless, discovered “no problems with the paper”, and that the Copenhagen staff had turned over all of its information. Unsatisfied, editors at Science utilized an expression of concern to the paper, and in October 2021, Yeston filed a criticism with the college to request an “independent, transparent investigation by experts.”

In June 2022, the college assembled a panel of impartial physicists to undertake the trouble: Sophie Guéron, on the University of Paris-Saclay; Allan MacDonald, on the University of Texas at Austin; and Pertti Hakonen, at Aalto University in Finland. They travelled to Copenhagen, carried out interviews and examined information from 60 microscopic units (the unique paper included information from 4). Their year-long investigation discovered no misconduct, however acknowledged that the staff’s choice of information led to “conclusions that did not adequately capture the variability of outcomes”. The excluded information, nevertheless, didn’t undermine the paper’s predominant conclusions, they mentioned.

One sticking level for Frolov and Mourik continues to be the Copenhagen staff’s alternative of ‘tunnelling regime’ — the vary of low electrical conductivities over which the units had been scanned. The Copenhagen researchers mentioned they noticed indicators of Majoranas persisting “throughout” their chosen tunnelling regime. But Frolov and Mourik mentioned that the additional information they acquired confirmed that the tunnelling regime was a lot wider, and that the telltale Majorana indicators had been restricted to the smaller tunnelling window.

Marcus responds that his staff first selected a slender tunnelling regime to keep away from noise, then seemed for indicators of Majoranas. The investigation panel agreed that the standards for a tunnelling regime made “physical sense”, however mentioned that together with all of the voltages would have “given a clearer, more faithful, picture of the complex behavior”. The correction features a prolonged description of the tunnelling regime. “They just have to be transparent,” Guéron says.

MacDonald agrees, and hopes that the correction will result in higher requirements for information availability.

Still looking

No group has replicated the Copenhagen staff’s outcomes, though researchers on the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg have studied related nanowires. In papers revealed in Science and Nature, they described discovering quasiparticles with electrical alerts resembling these of Majoranas; nevertheless, in the long run, the particles had been discovered to be mundane and missing the specified resilience to noise. (Nature’s information staff is impartial of its journal staff.)

Marcus contends that the ISTA research was not an equivalent replication of the Copenhagen research, as a result of, for instance, it relied on a special chemical to arrange the nanowires. He says that his staff could be comfortable to offer wires for one more group to try a replication, however to this point there have been no takers.

Much of the uncertainty across the Copenhagen group’s work stems from the messy underlying bodily world: dysfunction from even the smallest imperfection can destroy delicate quantum states and make information choice difficult. “At present this is a fact of life for all experimental searches for Majorana particles,” the impartial panel wrote in its report. “It is important that authors guard themselves against confirmation bias.”

Many researchers — aside from some at Microsoft — have responded to this by transferring on from searches for bona-fide Majoranas to in search of phenomena which are much less unique and extra secure. Marcus thinks his method is best than the options, however even he acknowledges the scenario: “It would be perfectly realistic to conclude based on all of the work that people have done that even though this is beautiful physics and completely correct, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t really reflect a path forward in designing quantum computers, because it’s just too fragile.”

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 14, 2025.