Google's Quantum Chip Willow Achieves Milestone in Quantum Computing

On December 9, research results were published in Nature, revealing that Willow, a quantum chip developed by Google in the United States, has for the first time achieved "below-threshold" quantum computing. This is a significant milestone in the pursuit of building accurate and practical quantum computers.

In the past few years, several companies and academic groups, including IBM and Amazon's AWS, have demonstrated that error correction can slightly enhance accuracy. In early 2023, Google released a research finding where 49 qubits were used in the Sycamore quantum processor, and each physical qubit was encoded in superconducting circuits. Willow is an improved version of this technology, boasting a larger scale with 105 physical qubits.

According to the head of Google's Quantum Computing Division, Willow is so powerful that it can complete a random circuit sampling task in about five minutes. In contrast, the world's largest supercomputer is expected to take 1025 years to finish the same task. This breakthrough with Willow represents a major step forward in the development of quantum computing technology, potentially opening new doors for solving complex problems that are currently intractable for classical computers.