Already for a few years the folks at the university of Delft are trying to make a quantum computer. They even teamed up with Microsoft and as memory serves the Dutch government is investing about 100 million € over the course of 10 years.

Only recently I dived into that Delft stuff and the spokeswoman from Microsoft was even talking about a Nobel prize for Leo Kouwenhoven because he seemed to have discovered so called Majorana fermions.

And I just felt sooooo proud that my fellow Dutch guy Leo who is sooooo ultrasmart would have a chance of winning such a prestigious prize like the Nobel prize. I will never get a Nobel prize for my stupid finding of the magnetic monopoles, come on that is not important because I am not a university person and Leo is a full blown physics professor.

After having said that it is nice to observe that the Delft team is trying to craft quantum computer with qubits made from Majorana fermions. So what are Majorana fermions because they have never been found since a guy named Ettore Majorana speculated about stuff like that in 1937? Well these are fermions that are their own anti particle.

It is well known that when you have a particle with a particular charge, the anti particle must have the opposite charge. Now our Leo Kouwenhoven genius from the Delft university is putting an electron into entanglement with an electron hole and as such it has no electrical charge if the electron hole has a positive electrical charge.

Furthermore since an electron entangled with a hole is only like half a fermion they cannot exist on their own so our genius folks from Delft figured out that two of those quasi particles would form a Majorana fermion.

Here is a Youtube video of about one hour long where our super hero Leo explains it all:

Majorana Fermions: Particle Physics on a Chip- Leo Kowenhoven – May 28 2015

Anyway, to make a long story short:

The Majorana particles as found by the heroic members of the Dutch university of Delft have a tiny problem: the electrons carry also magnetic charge beside the electrical charge. So a quasi particle made up of an electron and an electron hole cannot have the Majorana property of being it’s own anti particle…

So my estimation is rather simple: As long as the Delft hero’s keep on ignoring that electrons carry also magnetic charge, they will not succeed. On the contrary they will fail and very likely they will keep on failing because they are university people.

Too much money and too much titles & prestige, why should they change and get a more realistic view on quantum computing?

Before we split, here is a wiki on Majorana fermions. For me it is new that when a fermion is it’s own anti particle the wave function is real valued and not complex valued. As a take away you can also conclude that the Delft hero’s also got the wave function of the electron and electron hole completely wrong. Just like all those people in the science of chemistry who cannot model even the hydrogen molecule properly. So the chemistry people say ‘We need quantum computers’ and Leo Kouwenhoven says ‘I have great ideas in topological quantum computing!’

In my view these people are all crazy, but here is the wiki stuff on Majorana fermions:

Majorana fermions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorana_fermion

Till the next post.