ISLAMABAD: Google has announced its newest quantum computing breakthrough, the Willow chip, which is a major step towards building large-scale, commercially viable quantum computers. The announcement is a major milestone in the 10-year quest by Google to leverage quantum mechanics to come up with practical solutions.
The biggest problem with quantum computing has always been the fragility of qubits, or quantum bits, which are very sensitive to their surroundings. This tends to corrupt data and make inaccurate calculations. Conventionally, the more qubits, the higher the error rates, and this meant that systems would revert to classical computing behaviour.
But Willow has bucked that trend. According to the researchers at Google, they were able to increase the number of qubits in the system without raising the number of errors by using sophisticated quantum error correction methods. Indeed, the error rates fell exponentially with the number of qubits, a milestone in quantum error correction commonly referred to as below threshold, which had been envisioned since 1995 by physicist Peter Shor.
Importantly, Willow is one of the first quantum chips that incorporates real-time error correction, which allows maintaining the integrity of the data being operated. This puts Willow in a good position to be the first scalable quantum computer that can solve real-world, commercially valuable problems.
Willow has set a new precedent in terms of performance. In one benchmark test known as Random Circuit Sampling (RCS), which is generally regarded as the hardest benchmark in the field, Willow performed better than one of the world’s fastest classical supercomputers, Frontier. Although Frontier would require an estimated 10 septillion years to accomplish the task, Willow was able to do it in less than five minutes, which is indicative of the huge potential of quantum computing.
Willow chip Google developed the chip at their dedicated quantum facility in Santa Barbara, where they have fine-grained fabrication processes that enable high-quality qubits and an easy integration of the system. Willow has 105 qubits and T1 times, which are a measure of the length of time that qubits can retain information, and are nearly 100 microseconds. This is five times better than previous generations.
In the future, Google envisions Willow as a source of breakthroughs in the real world. The company is hoping to show quantum computations that cannot be performed on a classical computer, particularly in fields such as drug development, clean energy storage, and complex optimisation problems that apply to AI.
It is one of the projects of the larger Google Quantum AI programme, which sees quantum computing being used to revolutionise industries such as healthcare, advanced machine learning, and more. Scientific curiosity is no longer the sole objective, but the provision of real-world impact.
Although the practical applications are still in development, the success of Willow indicates that quantum computing is no longer a theory. With Google still working on perfecting this technology, the future of really useful quantum machines is approaching.
