The Australian innovation in Google's new quantum chip
A quantum computing innovation developed by researchers at the University of Sydney is being used in Google’s latest quantum chip, called Willow.
The processor, which was unveiled by the tech giant in December, utilises a breakthrough in error correction which can improve the performance of quantum devices.
The technology was formally detailed in 2021 when researchers in Australia — including a then-21-year-old student — shared a new type of “surface code”, which is used to prevent errors in complex quantum systems.
The code, which the team dubbed the “XZZX” code, made international headlines at the time, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) promising to use it in its quantum computing labs.
Google has since implemented the code to reduce “a very common type of noise” in Willow, according to the University of Sydney’s Professor Stephen Bartlett, who was part of the team behind the XZZX research.
“They are really pushing the state of the art in demonstrating error correction,” he told Information Age.
Pablo Bonilla was a 21-year-old undergraduate science student when he helped develop the XZZX code with Bartlett and other researchers at the University of Sydney.
The novel science which Bonilla pioneered, according to Bartlett, involved modifying standard surface code so that it can “correct very efficiently for the dominant source of errors, and spend fewer resources on correcting very rare errors”.
Google, which used “ZXXZ” surface code in Willow — essentially the same as XZZX, but written differently — has used variants of the code since 2019 but integrated the Australian research to improve its circuits’ ability to reduce noise, Information Age understands.
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