QuTech Achieves First-Ever Readout of Majorana Qubits (Nature)

Researchers at QuTech (Delft) and ICMM-CSIC (Madrid) demonstrated the first single-shot, real-time readout of quantum information stored in Majorana-based topological qubits, published in Nature. Using quantum capacitance as a global probe, the team distinguished even/odd parity states of a minimal Kitaev chain with parity coherence exceeding one millisecond.

Why This Matters: Topological qubits (Microsoft's primary approach) store information non-locally across Majorana zero modes, making them inherently resistant to local noise - but this same property made reading them a long-standing challenge. This breakthrough solves the readout problem without compromising topological protection, establishing the measurement primitive needed for functional Majorana-based quantum computers.