Willow: beating the brink
Working “beneath the brink” has been a purpose for error corrected quantum computing since its inception within the Nineties. Nonetheless, after virtually 30 years of development in system fabrication, calibration, and qubit design, quantum computer systems nonetheless hadn’t handed this landmark. That’s, till our newest 105-qubit superconducting processor, Willow.
Willow represents a major leap ahead in quantum {hardware}. It maintains the tunability of our earlier structure, Sycamore, whereas bettering the typical qubit lifetimes (T1) from about 20 μs to 68 µs ± 13 µs. The qubits and operations in our system are optimized with quantum error correction in thoughts, and run alongside our error correction software program, together with state-of-the-art machine studying, reinforcement studying, and graph-based algorithms to establish and proper errors precisely.
Utilizing Willow, we report the primary ever demonstration of exponential error suppression with rising floor code dimension. Every time we enhance our lattice in dimension from 3×3 to 5×5 to 7×7, the encoded error fee decreases by an element of two.14. This culminates in a logical qubit whose lifetime is greater than twice that of its greatest constituent bodily qubit, demonstrating the capability of an error-corrected qubit to transcend its bodily parts.
