Controversial Quantum-Computing Paper Gets a Hefty Correction
A key study that claims to provide almost almost major evidence of majorana received an in -depth correction five years after its publication in the journal Science. Two researchers who reported the article as a problem, claim that the correction is not sufficient – triggering the last dispute in a field hampered by the controversy.
For decades, physicists have been forced by the idea that ultracold electrons in microscopic devices could behave collectively to form quasiparticles resistant to noise – both environmental disturbances and the inherent atomic jigs that afflict all quantum systems. The resilience of these majoras could make them ideal candidates to train qubits, information units in quantum computers which are analogous to bits in conventional machines. Studies to prove their existence have been short, although the recent daring affirmations of the Microsoft technology giant carried out a considerable examination.
In September 2018, a team led by Charlie Marcus, a physicist from the University of Copenhagen, who also worked for Microsoft at the time, published a manuscript on the pre -printed server Arxiv which described a new approach to generate increases. The researchers made nanofils of Indium arseniure surrounded by an aluminum shell. By applying a small magnetic field, they then measured the “coherent” electrical signals with pairs of majos, one at each end of each wire. A year and a half later, they included theoretical simulations to justify their results, and the study was published in Science.
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Two physicists – Sergey Frolov, at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and Vincent Mourik, now at the Jülich research center in Germany – have raised questions about the validity of the data and in July 2021, Science applied an editorial expression of the concern to the article to warn readers of potential problems. NOW, Science raises this warning, and the authors emit a 20 -page correction to additional equipment in the document. The news of the correction was reported on July 31 for the first time by the site of The Register.
The authors say they are relieved by the result. “He does not really correct the mistakes,” explains the co-author saulius vaitiek & edot; NAS, physicist at the University of Copenhagen. “We summarize and provide additional information.” FROLOV, on the other hand, argues that the data in the document does not give a complete image of the behavior of the electrons in team devices and calls for retraction. “I don’t trust this data,” he says.
Jake Yeston, editor Science Who oversees the bids of physical sciences, says that the newspaper decided not to withdraw the newspaper because there was no “clear and community vision that it is obviously bad”. But, says Yeston, the lack of information in the original document was a problem, and it has now been solved. “It should not be a reader who wants to know what your protocol was having to go to your laboratory and talk to you,” he said. “It should be in the newspaper.”
Question data
Thirteen years ago, Frolov and Mourik were authors on a different study in Science This has brought in majority evidence. But the excitement around the result has faded after the researchers discovered that other trivial phenomena could imitate the quasiparticles.
When the manuscript of the Copenhagen team was published on Arxiv in 2018, Frolov and Mourik were doubtful, they therefore asked to see all the data. E-mails examined by Nature Show that the Copenhagen group published more data in November 2020. The pair of criticisms analyzed the information provided and concluded that the data was incomplete and contradict the central affirmations of the study. An internal survey of the University’s Physical Institute, however, found “no problem with the newspaper”, and that the Copenhagen team had returned all its data. Dissatisfied, publishers at Science Applied an expression from concern to the document and, in October 2021, Yeston filed a complaint with the university to request an “independent and transparent investigation by experts”.
In June 2022, the university brought together a panel of independent physicists to undertake the effort: Sophie Guéron, at the University of Paris-Saclay; Allan Macdonald, at the University of Texas in Austin; And Pertti Hakonen, at Aalto University in Finland. They went to Copenhagen, conducted interviews and examined the data of 60 microscopic devices (the original article included data of 4). Their one year investigation found no fault, but said that the team’s selection of data led to “conclusions that did not adequately capture the variability of the results”. The data excluded, however, did not undermine the main conclusions of the document, they said.
A collage point for Frolov and Mourik continues to be the choice of the Copenhagen team of “tunneling diet” – the range of low electric conductivities on which the devices were scanned. Copenhagen researchers said they had seen signs of persistent “throughout” majoras of their chosen tunneling regime. But Frolov and Mourik said that the additional data they received showed that the tunneling diet was much wider and that the revealing majorana signs were limited to the small tunneling window.
Marcus replied that his team first chose a narrow tunneling diet to avoid noise, then looked for majority signs. The investigation committee agreed that the criteria of a tunneling regime had a “physical meaning”, but said that the inclusion of all tensions would have “given a clearer and more faithful image of complex behavior”. The correction includes a long description of the tunneling diet. “They just have to be transparent,” says Guéron.
Macdonald agrees and hopes that the correction will lead to better standards of data availability.
Always looking for
No group has reproduced the results of the Copenhagen team, although researchers at the Austrian Science and Technology Institute (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg have studied similar nanofils. In articles published in Science And NatureThey described to find almost appropriateness with electrical signals resembling those of the Majos; However, at the end, the particles proved to be banal and lacking in resilience desired with noise. (NatureThe news team is independent of their newspaper team.)
Marcus maintains that the ISTA study was not an identical replication of the Copenhagen study, because, for example, it was based on a different chemical to prepare nanofils. He says that his team would be happy to provide sons to another group to try replication, but so far, there have been no takers.
A large part of the uncertainty around the work of the Copenhagen group comes from the disorderly underlying physical world: the very small disorder of the smallest imperfection can destroy delicate quantum states and make the selection of data difficult. “Currently, it is a reality for all experimental research in Majorana particles,” wrote the independent panel in its report. “It is important that the authors claim to be against confirmation biases.”
Many researchers – with the exception of some at Microsoft – have responded to this by passing research by majoranes in good faith in search of less exotic and more stable phenomena. Marcus thinks that his approach is better than the alternatives, but even he recognizes the situation: “It would be perfectly realistic to conclude on the basis of all the work that people have done, even if it is a beautiful physics and completely correct, as far as I am concerned, this does not really reflect a path in the design of quantum computers, because it is simply too fragile.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first publication August 14, 2025.
