Watch Google Quantum AI Reveal Willow Quantum Computing Chip – Video

Introducing our latest quantum computing chip developed to learn and evolve like the natural world around us. Willow from Google quantum A I. Hi, I’m Julian Kelly, director of hardware at Google Quantum A I. And today on behalf of our amazing team, I’m proud to announce Willow Willow is Google’s newest and most powerful superconducting quantum computing chip. And the next step in our path towards building large scale quantum computers and exploring your applications. I’ve been fascinated with quantum computing since I first experimented with Cubis in 2008. And since coming to Google in 2015, it has been a dream to make our mission a reality building quantum computers for otherwise unsolvable problems. We launched our first chip foxtail in 2017, followed by Bristol Cohen in 2018 and Sycamore in 2019 which powered our milestone one, the first quantum computer to surpass the best classical supercomputer on a computational task random circuit sampling over the years with sycamore, we have been able to squeeze a remarkable amount of performance from our hardware including achieving a scalable logical cubit in our milestone too. But we have ultimately been limited by quantum coherence times the length of time cubist maintain their intended state. With Willow, we’ve made a huge step forward. We’ve increased quantum coherence times by a factor of five going from 20 microseconds in Sycamore to 100 microseconds in Willow. And we’ve accomplished this all without sacrificing any of the features that made our systems so successful. This advancement was enabled by our new dedicated superconducting quantum chip fabrication facility in Santa Barbara, one of only a few in the world. And we’re seeing exciting developments coming from Willow, which has already surpassed Sycamore’s breakthrough demonstrations. Our logical qubits now operate below the critical quantum error correction threshold. A long sought after goal for the quantum computing field since the theory was discovered in the nineties. And we’ve achieved it for the first time with willow errors are exponentially suppressed in our logical qubits as error rates are halved. Each time we add physical qubits in scale from distance 3 to 5 to 7 surface coats. Additionally, our logical cubit lifetimes are now much longer than all of the lifetimes of the physical qubits that compose them. This means that even as we make our quantum shifts larger and more complex, by adding more cubits, we can use quantum error correction to actually improve their accuracy. We’ve pitted Willow against one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with their random circuit sampling benchmark. The results are pretty surprising by our best estimates, a calculation that takes Willow under five minutes would take the fastest supercomputer 10 to the 25 years. That’s a one with 25 zeros following it or a time scale way longer than the age of the universe. This result highlights the exponentially growing gap between classical and quantum computation for certain applications. Let’s talk about the hardware approach. We’ve pioneered at Google quantum A I that makes these things possible. Our returnable cubits and couplers enable super fast gates and operations to achieve low error rates, reconfigurable to optimize hardware in situ and run multiple applications and high connectivity to efficiently express algorithms. We leverage this tun ability to enable reproducible high performance across the device. Let me explain a challenge in superconducting cubits is that not all of them are created equal, some are outliers with uncharacteristically high ears. But here’s where our trainable cubits really shine. We’re able to fix these outlier cubits by reconfiguring them to perform in line with the rest of the device. And we can go one step further by having our researchers use tune ability to continuously develop new calibration strategies that push errors down across all cubits with software. Let’s quantify this and nerd out for a minute. On quantum computer tech specs we have number of cubits connectivity is the average number of interactions each Cuba can perform with its neighbors. We quantify error probabilities for running simultaneous operations, single cubic gates, two cubic gates in measurement coherence time measures how long each qubit can retain its information measurement rate is how many computations we can run per second. An application performance is a full system. Benchmark. Willow hits a sweet spot across the full list. It has a large number of cubits with high connectivity and can run diverse applications. We measure low mean error rates across all operations with multiple native two cubic gates. We have greatly increased t one times we have very high measurement rates and willow is below the error correction threshold and performs random circuit sampling. Far beyond what is possible with classical computers looking to the future with willow. We continue our journey towards building large scale and useful error corrected quantum computers that will push the boundaries of science and the exploration of nature with future commercially useful applications in areas like pharmaceuticals, batteries and fusion power. We are excited to solve the otherwise unsolvable problems of tomorrow.