The Levitating Sphere That Will Fix Quantum Computers

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The conventional quantum computer is very fragile because any type of heat or vibration will destroy the qubit data instantaneously. Yet this levitation experiment can potentially solve this problem. Superfluid helium-3 is inserted into a chamber. It acts as a topological liquid that protects information. A superconducting sphere is set in the middle and it's held magnetically with the surrounding electromagnetic coils.

[00:00:23]This means that it has no friction and it acts as a highly accurate probe. The superfluid contains bound states and if there's a measurable frictional drag on the superconductor, then it can detect the elusive Majorana particle. This weird exotic state of matter is not subjected to noise like a normal qubit.

[00:00:40]So this means that it could use 10 instead of 1,000 qubits to make one logical unit. In turn, this particle can lead to a fault-tolerant quantum topological computer and this could run without massive error correction, thus making this elusive type of computing actually practical.