India, Feb. 21 -- Quantum computing, or the race to make it a reality, may have entered a new era with Microsoft's announcement that it has developed a new quantum computing chip, Majorana 1, that can potentially fit a million qubits (quantum bits). The discovery can make quantum computing a reality, at some point in the future.

Microsoft has achieved this by creating a new state of matter according to the company - essentially a new material made from indium arsenide and aluminium (the first is a semiconductor and the latter is a superconductor when cooled).

At the heart of Microsoft's creation is a concept called a topological qubit. That warrants some explanation. Traditional computing stores information in bits, encoded as either a ...