Google recently released some blogs about Willow, its next-generation quantum processor. These blogs are currently making headlines and causing substantial confusion. Let’s break them down so you have a clear picture of what they mean.
Google’s Big Breakthrough: Scalable Quantum Error Correction
Google’s most significant achievement is a major advancement in quantum error correction – a critical challenge in quantum computing due to the fragile nature of qubits. Qubits exist in a “superposition” state, making them highly susceptible to errors from environmental interference. Without effective error correction, qubits lose stability too quickly to perform useful computations.
To address this, Google improved on a method to group “physical qubits” into more stable “logical qubits” using a well-established technique called surface codes. Traditionally, increasing the number of connected qubits in a “surface code lattice” has led to higher error rates – the opposite of what is needed to create logical qubits from physical ones.
Google scaled from a 3×3 to a 7×7 physical qubit lattice while reducing the error rate by a factor of 2.14, effectively doubling the lifespan of logical qubits compared to its earlier Sycamore chip. This achievement demonstrates that we can add more physical qubits while exponentially improving the stability of logical qubits. And we will need much, much larger lattices to correct logical qubits to the point of usefulness. It looks like we might get there now.
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