Willow: What Google’s error-correcting chip means for quantum computing

Google has just announced a new quantum chip, Willow, and the breakthrough needs to be read right in order to understand its implications. The idea is to incorporate error correction codes in “logical qubits”, each created across a number of “physical qubits”. Logical qubits make quantum computing even more complex since they are built across a number of physical qubits. And it’s a ‘beyond breakeven’ demonstration, where our arrays of qubits have longer lifetimes than the individual physical qubits do, an unfakable sign that error correction is improving the system overall,” Neven added. “Firstly, in superconducting quantum chips, Google has demonstrated the realisation of an error correction protocol known theoretically, which implies that we are heading towards fault-tolerant quantum computers.