US physicists have developed a hybrid material whose "split electronic personality" could lead to high-performance, fault-resistant quantum computers in the future.
The material, called a topological superconductor, had an interior that conducted electricity like a superconductor and a surface that behaved like a metal.
Researchers said it could be used to create and manipulate Majorana fermions - particles theorised to be the building block of a self-correcting quantum computer.
Quantum information loss, or decoherence, has been a roadblock in the development of quantum computers, which use notoriously fickle qubits to store and process information.
Since qubits could not be progressively measured or copied due to the laws of quantum mechanics, conventional error-correction techniques would not apply.
Scientists hoped that Majorana fermions - which had no electrical charge and thus travelled along predictable paths - could be used in fault-tolerant, 'topological' quantum computers.
Topological machines could store information in the more robust Majorana fermions, or be designed to identify and correct for errors as they occurred.
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