Microsoft’s new “topological qubit” is not based on a solid, liquid or gas. It is another phase of matter that many experts did not think was possible.

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quasiparticles are collections of particles (and, in some cases, field lines) that can be described mathematically as if they were a single particle with properties that are distinct from their constituents. The best-known of these are probably the Cooper pairs that electrons form in superconducting materials.

Microsoft says it has developed a breakthrough quantum processor based on a new state of matter, giving it a clear path to achieve quantum computing’s long-term promise of solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

At the core of a quantum computer are qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing much like the binary bits that computers use today. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Goo