Google AI recaps 2021 quantum progress
Just before 2021 came to a close, Google AI Quantum provided a review of its work in 2021 via the Internet giant’s The Keyword blog.
Emily Mount, project management lead, quantum computing, Google AI Quantum, stated in the post that the company continues to progress on its efforts to migrate from the NISQ-era quantum computers of today toward better error correction.
“We have made chips with better qubits, improved the methods that we use to package these chips to better connect them with our control electronics, and developed techniques to calibrate large chips with several dozens of qubits simultaneously,” she stated, adding, “These improvements culminated in two key results. First, we are now able to reset our qubits with high fidelity, allowing us to reuse qubits in quantum computations. Second, we have realized mid-circuit measurement that allows us to keep track of computation within quantum circuits. Together, the high-fidelity resets and mid-circuit measurements were used in our recent demonstration of exponential suppression of bit and phase flip errors using repetition codes, resulting in 100x suppression of these errors as the size of the code grows from 5 to 21 qubits.”
Improvements in error correction quickly became arguably the quantum sector’s top priority during 2021, as Google, Amazon, IBM, IonQ and many other companies and researchers touted innovations in that area. Just in the last month, QuTech and ETH Zurich separately claimed to have achieved error correction milestones.
Regarding Google’s hopes for 2022, Mount didn’t say anything too specific, only that Google is continuing efforts to grow its team and expand the quantum data center campus that it opened in Santa Barbara, California, during 2021.
“We have big expectations for 2022 as we focus on progressing through our hardware milestones, the discovery of new quantum algorithms, and the realization of quantum applications on the quantum processors of today,” Mount wrote.
