Today’s quantum computers are delicate devices—sensitive to disruption by environmental noise. Physicists are thus pursuing alternatives called topological quantum computers, which harness quasiparticles—Majorana fermions—predicted to be resilient to noise (see Viewpoint: A Roadmap for a Scalable Topological Quantum Computer). Now Kristian Mæland and Asle Sudbø at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim propose a way to generate Majorana fermions without the superconducting materials that were previously thought to be required for such fermions to emerge [1]. By expanding the material choice, the approach could bring topological quantum computers a step closer to realization.
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