But in recent years, quantum computing has caught the attention of the corporate world. Microsoft established a significant quantum computing research effort in 2006, creating the Station Q research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since then, I.B.M., Northrop Grumman and BBN Technologies have also begun quantum computing research focused on earlier efforts to create qubits based on measuring the spin of an electron or the polarization of a photon.

While scientists have created individual qubits, they are extremely fragile, and creating the arrays of hundreds or thousands of circuits necessary to build a useful quantum computer has proved daunting.

D-Wave Systems, a Canadian company that has had support from NASA, Google and Lockheed Martin, has made claims that it has been able to speed up some computing problems based on what it describes as “the first commercial quantum computer.”

On Thursday, however, an independent group of scientists reported in the journal Science that they had so far found no evidence of the kind of speedup that is expected from a quantum computer in tests of a 503 qubit D-Wave computer. The company said through a spokesman that the kinds of problems the scientists evaluated would not benefit from the D-Wave design.

Microsoft’s topological approach is generally perceived as the most high-risk by scientists, because the type of exotic anyon particle needed to generate qubits has not been definitively proved to exist.

That may change soon. The company has been spending heavily and is contributing to 10 of the roughly 20 academic research groups exploring a long-hypothesized class of subatomic particles known as Majorana fermions. Beyond being a scientific advance, proving the existence of the Majorana would mean that it was likely they could be used to form qubits for this new form of quantum computing.

Microsoft supported research, led by the physicist Leo Kouwenhoven at the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, that in 2012 produced the strongest evidence that the long-predicted particles exist.