Google’s Quantum Leap: Willow Chip Marks Historic Breakthrough in Quantum Computing
Google has made a groundbreaking announcement today, unveiling its quantum computing chip, Willow. This marks a historic achievement in quantum error correction, a challenge that researchers have been grappling with for nearly three decades.
The 105-qubit Willow processor has the capability to exponentially reduce errors as more qubits are added. This solves the fundamental scalability challenge that has been a major roadblock in the development of quantum computing.
The chip demonstrated its extraordinary computational power by performing a complex calculation in under five minutes. To put this into perspective, the world’s fastest supercomputer would take approximately 10 septillion years to complete the same task. This achievement is a significant stride towards building commercially viable quantum computers. These could potentially revolutionize fields including drug discovery, materials science, and artificial intelligence.
“This historic accomplishment is known in the field as ‘below threshold’ – being able to drive errors down while scaling up the number of qubits,” said Dr. Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI.
The Willow chip was fabricated at Google’s purpose-built quantum fabrication facility in Santa Barbara. It represents a major milestone on Google’s roadmap towards commercially relevant quantum applications.
Source: Google Blog