Google Quantum AI announced a new 105-qubit quantum processor with advanced error correction capabilities that can take error rates “below a critical threshold needed for achieving future practical quantum computing,” according to an article the company published in Nature.
The announcement comes just a few weeks after IBM made its annual November big-splash batch of quantum announcements, showing how the tech giants playing in the quantum space are ramping up their efforts as the promising quantum computing business is beginning to mature into something resembling a viable market.
Google’s latest move in this rapidly developing market is the launch of Willow. Hartmut Neven, Founder and Lead of Google Quantum AI, said during a briefing that Willow “consists of over 100 physical qubits, and the error rates have achieved… several important metrics, but one key metric is the two-qubit error rate, which is just one error in a thousand. So it's a stellar piece of quantum hardware.”
Error correction research has become a focal point of the quantum computing sector, with accuracy and reliability being the historical vulnerabilities of quantum systems, even as innovators have increased overall system potential through enabling more qubits. It has been long thought that producing high-quality, logical qubits would require exponentially more physical qubits, though in the last year or so companies such as AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Quantinuum, QuEra (which Google Quantum AI recently invested in), and more, have challenged that notion with a variety of more efficient advanced methods for error correction or reduction.
Explaining the significance of Google’s latest achievement, Neven stated in a blog post, “...The more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors, and the more quantum the system becomes. We tested ever-larger arrays of physical qubits, scaling up from a grid of 3x3 encoded qubits, to a grid of 5x5, to a grid of 7x7 — and each time, using our latest advances in quantum error correction, we were able to cut the error rate in half. In other words, we achieved an exponential reduction in the error rate. This historic accomplishment is known in the field as 'below threshold' — being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits.”
Neven also said Willow can vastly out-perform the Frontier supercomputer in running a standard benchmark. “If you run this benchmark on Willow, then it would take Willow just a few minutes, five minutes, but on... Frontier [reportedly now the world’s second-fastest supercomputer after Aurora], it would take 10 septillion years,” Neven said. (If it is hard to grasp what that timeframe means, consider that the Earth is likely to crash into the Sun–taking all supercomputers and quantum computers along with it–in just 7.5 billion years, a much, much shorter timeframe.)
Google’s announcement seemed to further wake up the stock market to the potential of quantum computing. In recent weeks, publicly-traded quantum start-ups like IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and Quantum Computing, Inc., have seen their stock values rise on news of progress with customers. The unveiling of Willow this week appeared to briefly drive a roughly 7% increase in the price of Google parent Alphabet.
The Google news came a few weeks after IBM said that its 156-qubit Quantum Heron processor “can now leverage Qiskit [open-source SDK] to accurately run certain classes of quantum circuits with up to 5,000 two-qubit gate operations.” Amazon Web Services, already a major player in quantum computing via the cloud, also has made several quantum computing announcements in recent weeks as some of high-tech’s biggest names are starting to act like the promising future of quantum computing is getting just a little bit closer.