# Majorana qubits with Chetan Nayak

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-new-quantum-era-innovation-in-quantum-computing-science-and-technology-5609388/majorana-qubits-with-chetan-nayak
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-new-quantum-era-innovation-in-quantum-computing-science-and-technology-5609388/majorana-qubits-with-chetan-nayak.md
Podcast: [The New Quantum Era - innovation in quantum computing, science and technology](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-new-quantum-era-innovation-in-quantum-computing-science-and-technology-5609388)
Published: 2026-01-12T17:30:42+00:00
Episode link: https://newquantumera.transistor.fm/74
Audio file: https://op3.dev/e/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.transistor.fm/ad0ab23d/888a8d75.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-new-quantum-era-innovation-in-quantum-computing-science-and-technology-5609388/episodes/majorana-qubits-with-chetan-nayak
Duration seconds: 3806

## Resource

In this episode of The New Quantum Era, your host Sebastian Hassinger is joined by Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, professor of physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, and driving force behind Microsoft's quantum hardware R&D program. They discuss a modality of qubit that has not been covered on the podcast before, based on Majorana fermonic behaviors, which have the promise of providing topological protection against the errors which are such a challenge to quantum computing. Guest Bio Chetan Nayak is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and leads the company’s topological quantum hardware program, including the Majorana‑1 processor based on Majorana‑zero‑mode qubits. He is also a professor of physics at UCSB and a leading theorist in topological phases of matter, non‑Abelian anyons, and topological quantum computation. Chetan co‑founded Microsoft’s Station Q in 2005, building a bridge from theoretical proposals for topological qubits to engineered semiconductor–superconductor devices. What we talk about Chetan’s first exposure to quantum computing in Peter Shor’s lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study, and how that intersected with his PhD work with Frank Wilczek on non‑Abelian topological phases and Majorana zero modes. The early days of topological quantum computation: fractional quantum Hall states at , emergent quasiparticles, and the realization that braiding these excitations naturally implements Clifford gates. How Alexei Kitaev’s toric‑code and Majorana‑chain ideas connected abstract topology to concrete condensed‑matter systems, and led to Chetan’s collaboration with Michael Freedman and Sankar Das Sarma. The 2005 proposal for a gallium‑arsenide quantum Hall device realizing a topological qubit, and the founding of Station Q…

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