New State Of Matter Has Major Compute Power Potential

Topological superconductivity is the name for the new state of matter shown by scientists in a research paper published this week. But it's not the name that's most important to us – it's the implications lit up by the possibility of the existence of this new state. If we siphon down the most complicated bits down to the simplest potential results, we get the following: The possibility that we'll be able to break through barriers in both computing and data storage.

We could have far faster and more powerful gadgets in the future. We could have gadgets with far more internal, on-device data storage than any device ever had before. It'll be tough for the average person to give a care about the situation because of the way smart devices are marketed – every year devices get more powerful, right? There's no reason to believe that there's a limit, right?

There are limits to potential processing power that can be generated by a piece of hardware of a certain size. There's also a limit to how much data can be stored inside a piece of hardware of a certain size. Those limits are far higher than the average person would need to utilize – but that won't be true forever.

A paper was released by a set of researchers led by William Mayer and Matthieu C Dartiailh of the Center of Quantum Phenomena, Department of Physics, New York University. They've suggested that they now have experimental evidence of a new state of matter. This state of matter is topological superconductivity.

"This new topological state can be manipulated in ways that could both speed calculation in quantum computing and boost storage," said Javad Shabani, assistant professor of physics at New York University, another member of the research team for the paper published this week.

"The new discovery of topological superconductivity in a two-dimensional platform paves the way for building scalable topological qubits to not only store quantum information, but also to manipulate the quantum states that are free of error," said Shabani.

To learn more, take a peek at "Phase signature of topological transition in Josephson Junctions," by authors William Mayer, Matthieu C. Dartiailh, Joseph Yuan, Kaushini S. Wickramasinghe, Alex Matos-Abiague, Igor Žutić, Javad Shabani. You can find this research with code arXiv:1906.01179v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall] 2019. arxiv.org/pdf/1906.01179 with Cornell University as submitted by Shabani.