Google's Advances in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing

Google Unveils Willow: A Leap Forward in Quantum Computing Google Quantum AI has introduced Willow, a cutting-edge quantum chip designed to address two of the field’s most significant challenges: error correction and computational scalability. Willow, fabricated in Google’s Santa Barbara facility, achieves state-of-the-art performance, marking a pivotal step toward realizing a large-scale, commercially viable quantum computer. It gets way geekier from here – but if you’re with me so far… Exponential Error Reduction Julian Kelly, Director of Quantum Hardware at Google, emphasized Willow’s ability to exponentially reduce errors as the system scales. Utilizing a grid of superconducting qubits, Willow demonstrated a historic breakthrough in quantum error correction. By expanding arrays from 3×3 to 5×5 and then 7×7 qubits, researchers cut error rates in half with each iteration. This achievement, referred to as being “below threshold,” signifies that larger quantum systems can now exhibit fewer errors, a challenge pursued since Peter Shor introduced quantum error correction in 1995. The chip also achieved “beyond breakeven” performance, where arrays of qubits outperformed the lifetimes of individual qubits, which is key to ensuring the feasibility of practical quantum computations. Ten Septillion Years in Five Minutes Willow’s computational capabilities were validated using the Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark, a rigorous test of quantum supremacy. According to Google’s estimates, Willow completed a task in under five minutes that would take a modern supercomputer ten septillion years—a timescale exceeding the age of the universe. This achievement underscores the rapid, double-exponential performance improvements of quantum systems over classical alternatives. While the RCS benchmark lacks direct commercial applications, it remains a critical indicator of quantum computational power. Kelly noted that surpassing classical systems on this benchmark solidifies confidence in the broader potential of quantum technology. Building Toward Practical Applications Google’s roadmap aims to bridge the gap between theoretical quantum advantage and real-world utility. The team is now focused on achieving “useful, beyond-classical” computations that solve practical problems. Applications in drug discovery, battery design, and AI optimization are among the potential breakthroughs quantum computing could unlock. Willow’s advancements in quantum error correction and computational scalability highlight its transformative potential. As Kelly explained, “Quantum algorithms have fundamental scaling laws on their side,” making quantum computing indispensable for tasks beyond the reach of classical systems. Quantum computing is still years away, but this is an exciting milestone. Considering the remarkable rate of technological improvement we’re experiencing right now, practical quantum computing (and quantum AI) may be closer than we think. -s

The real significance of Google's Willow quantum chip... Fundamentally, building quantum computers (QC) is about achieving low operation errors. Sure, other metrics matter too, but the error rate is the big one. If you look at the landscape of QC applications, many of them require *ridiculously* low error rates - say 1 error in 10^12 operations or less. Nobody thinks this can be achieved through hardware engineering alone - this needs quantum error correction (QEC) for sure. But should we be confident that QEC will actually work? Sure, it will work to some extent - but can it work well enough to reach error rates as low as 1e-12 or less? QEC makes non-trivial assumptions about the nature of the physical errors which are never quite true, and deviations from those assumptions could plausibly derail QEC by setting a "logical noise floor" - an error rate below which QEC ceases to work. The previous most thorough search for the logical noise floor in QEC was performed by Google in 2023. At that time, they found that QEC ceases to work at a rather high error rate of 1e-6. This was due to high-energy cosmic rays hitting their qubit chips, causing large-scale correlated errors which cannot be taken out by QEC. That's a *big* issue! Google latest chip incorporates design changes to make it immune to cosmic ray errors. After incorporating those changes, the logical noise floor search was repeated and reported in the recent paper. It turns out the mitigation work, and the logical noise floor was pushed all the way down to a new record of 1e-10, i.e. 1 error per 10^10 operations! This is the most convincing evidence to date that - in a well-engineered QC - QEC is actually capable of pushing the error rates down to levels compatible with most known QC applications. To me, this repetition-code is actually the most important finding reported in Google's paper! Funnily enough, Google's team reports that they actually don't know where this error may be coming from. Error rates this low are also really challenging to study, because it can take considerable data acquisition time to establish meaningful statistics. But I'm sure they'll figure it out soon enough... 😇

A quantum computer that learns from its own errors while it's computing. That's the framing in a recent paper from Google Quantum AI and Google DeepMind on reinforcement learning control of quantum error correction. Large quantum processors drift. The standard fix is to halt the computation and recalibrate, which won't scale to algorithms expected to run for days or weeks. The authors ask whether QEC can calibrate itself from the data it already produces. The idea: repurpose error detection events as a training signal for a reinforcement learning agent that continuously tunes the physical control parameters (pulse amplitudes, detunings, DRAG coefficients, CZ parameters, and so on). Rather than optimizing logical error rate directly, which is expensive and global, the agent minimizes average detector-event rate, a cheap local proxy whose gradient is approximately aligned with the gradient of LER in the small-perturbation regime. The results on a Willow superconducting processor: - On distance-5 surface and color codes, RL fine-tuning after conventional calibration and expert tuning yields about 20% additional LER suppression - Against injected drift, RL steering improves logical stability 2.4x, rising to 3.5x when decoder parameters are also steered - New record logical error per cycle: 7.72(9)×10⁻⁴ for a distance-7 surface code (with the AlphaQubit2 decoder) and 8.19(14)×10⁻³ for a distance-5 color code (with Tesseract) - In simulation, the framework scales to a distance-15 surface code with roughly 40,000 control parameters, with a convergence rate that is independent of system size The broader takeaway: calibration and computation may not need to be separate phases. If detector statistics can carry enough information to steer a large control stack online, fault tolerance becomes less about pausing to retune and more about a processor that keeps learning while it computes. Worth noting that the current experiments rely on short repeated memory circuits, so real-time steering during a single long logical algorithm (where exploration noise would affect the computation directly) remains future work. Paper: https://lnkd.in/gVQXnpzZ

Google Quantum AI Demonstrates Three Dynamic Surface Codes, Advancing Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing Introduction Quantum computers promise exponential gains but remain constrained by extreme fragility: qubits are easily disrupted by noise, making error correction the central challenge of the field. Google Quantum AI has now taken a major step toward practical fault tolerance by successfully implementing three dynamic versions of the surface code—one of the most promising quantum error-correction frameworks. Key Developments • The team realized three distinct dynamic surface code circuits—hex, iSWAP, and walking—originally proposed in theoretical work by co-author Matt McEwen. • Their experiments validate that multiple circuit variations can work on real hardware, expanding pathways for adapting error-correction codes to specific device architectures. • Hex circuit: Recompiles the surface code onto a hexagonal grid, reducing connectivity requirements from four neighbors to three. This simplifies fabrication and achieved 2.15× better error suppression. • iSWAP circuit: Replaces CZ gates with iSWAP gates, which are easier to execute and avoid leakage errors. Though they introduce CPHASE errors, the team showed strong performance even on hardware optimized for CZ gates, achieving 1.56× error suppression. • Walking circuit: Allows qubits to exchange roles, effectively “walking” logical information across the chip. This helps isolate and clean leakage errors and offers a new method for routing logical qubits, delivering 1.69× better suppression. • All three implementations successfully detected and corrected noise without disturbing quantum information, confirming the practicality of dynamic constructions. Scientific Significance • This is the strongest evidence yet that dynamic surface codes—adapted to hardware constraints—can function reliably in real quantum devices. • The team also introduced a simplified “detector budgeting” technique, enabling easier analysis of how specific error sources impact logical performance. • The work opens new avenues for designing codes tailored to imperfect hardware, enabling better yield and robustness as systems scale. • Upcoming experiments will explore even more advanced dynamic circuits, including those based on the LUCI framework for routing around faulty qubits. Why This Matters Reliable quantum error correction is the linchpin for large-scale quantum computing. Google’s demonstration shows that error-correcting codes can be adapted dynamically to real hardware constraints—unlocking higher performance, easier fabrication, and more flexible architectures. This progress accelerates the roadmap toward fault-tolerant quantum systems capable of solving real-world scientific and industrial problems. I share daily insights with 34,000+ followers across defense, tech, and policy. If this topic resonates, I invite you to connect and continue the conversation. Keith King https://lnkd.in/gHPvUttw

Google's Willow chip shows that quantum error correction is starting to work. Just "starting", because while the ~1e-3 error rate reached by Willow is good, it has been achieved by others without error correction. So, how do we get error rates we couldn't reach with physical qubits alone? Easy: you "just" add more qubits in your logical qubit. But because there are errors on two dimensions in quantum computing, a 2D-structure (the surface code) is usually required to correct errors. This means that increasing protection against errors causes the number of qubits to grow quickly. With a surface code, protecting against 1 error at a time during an error correction cycle requires 17 qubits. 2 errors at a time? 49 qubits. 3 errors at a time? 97 qubits. This is the max Willow could achieve. This quadratic scaling leads Google to expect that reaching a 1e-6 error rate on a Willow-like chip will require some 1457 physical qubits (protecting against 13 errors at a time). And this is the reason why Alice & Bob is going for cat qubits instead. By reducing error correction from a 2D to a 1D problem, cat qubits make the scaling of error rates much more favorable. Even with the simplest error correction code (a repetition code), correcting one error at a time only requires 5 qubits. 2 errors? 9 qubits. 3 errors? 13 qubits. 13 errors? This is just 53 qubits instead of 1457! This situation is summarized in the graph below. It is taken from our white paper (link in the 1st comment) and I added a point corresponding to the biggest Willow experiment. Now, to be fair, Alice & Bob still needs to release the results of even a 5-qubit experiment. But when this is done, there is a fair chance the error rates will quickly catch up with those achieved by Google or others, because so few additional qubits are required to improve error rates. There are big challenges on both sides. Mastering cat qubits is hard. Scaling chips is hard. But consistent progress is being made on both sides too. Anyway, I can't wait for the moment when I can add the Alice & Bob equivalent of the Willow experiment on the chart below. And for once, I hope it will be up and to the left!

What does the new Quantum computing breakthrough by Google actually mean? 1. It is a true breakthrough on the path to a quantum computer. We’ve been talking about quantum error correction for nearly 30 years but this is the first time error correction has been shown to get better at a sufficient rate as the computing power scales (known as “below the threshold” in the field). This creates real promise. 2. It’s still a way off from being useful. Performing a calculation in five minutes that today’s super computers would take longer than the age of the universe is very impressive and the press articles all picked up on that. But that’s a very specific test (“RCS”) and the business applications we’ve talked about, from medicines to batteries to security, are still 5-15 years away (the optimists to pessimists spread) 3. It raises interesting questions about the interplay between Quantum and AI. AI became so much better so quickly that some are saying that the need for quantum computation has gone down. Quantum pessimists say we can do so much more with classical computers and transformer models than we thought would be possible a few years ago, why go through the effort of developing a quantum computer? Is it a very expensive hammer looking for a nail. The contrasting, quantum optimist view says that AI models create such an insatiable demand for computing power that quantum computers will be an essential enabler for further waves of AI. I don’t know the answer, but I’m sure any good quantum scientist would say it’s perfectly possible to hold two opposing views at once 😏 #mckinseydigital

Computing just changed forever. Google Quantum AI has unveiled Willow, their most advanced superconducting quantum chip yet. Small enough to fit in your hand, it can solve problems in minutes that would take even the most advanced supercomputers, like El Capitan, longer than the age of the universe. Willow’s breakthrough lies in error correction, reducing instability that has long held quantum computing back. It’s also extended the time qubits can remain stable, a critical step toward making quantum systems more practical. While quantum computing is still in its infancy, advancements like this hint at a future where we solve problems once thought impossible. But alongside the opportunities lie challenges, especially for encryption and cybersecurity. What’s your take on quantum’s potential? Are we ready for this leap forward? PS. What is quantum computing, and its current applications (4 mins reading) https://lnkd.in/gDD3tXGb __________________ I share my learning journey here. Join me and let's grow together. For more on AI & Machine Learning, please check my previous posts. Alex Wang

Quantum computing just hit a turning point. Google’s Willow chip did something the industry has chased for 30 years: For 30 years, adding more qubits (the building blocks of quantum computers) meant adding more errors. You scale up, and the system collapses. Not anymore. Google’s new Willow chip flipped the script. For the first time: → More qubits meant fewer errors. This is what the industry calls "below threshold." It’s the point where error correction actually works, and it’s a critical milestone for building useful quantum computers. And Willow didn’t stop there. It ran a computation in under 5 minutes. The world’s fastest supercomputer? It would take 10 septillion years to do the same. For context, that’s: - 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. - Longer than the age of the universe. If you're in tech, this matters. Willow is the clearest proof yet that quantum computing isn’t a pipe dream. It’s happening. And it’s coming faster than most people think. The applications? Limitless: → Drug discovery, → materials science, → energy optimization → problems classical computers can’t touch. Willow is the chip that says: quantum is real. This is the milestone we’ll look back on as the moment quantum broke out of the lab and into the future. #google #willow #quantum