Google Quantum AI announced that its Willow quantum chip has achieved "magic state cultivation" on real hardware for the first time, with the results published in Science. It is a key step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Key points:
- About 40 times fewer errors: the cultivated T state reached a logical fidelity of 99.99%, a record;
- Targeting the biggest bottleneck: preparing high-quality magic states is extremely resource-intensive; under older methods, an estimated 95% of a quantum computer's capacity would go to producing magic states, leaving little for actual computation;
- Ready to connect to scaling up: the cultivated magic states were successfully transferred between two error-correcting codes (a distance-3 color code and a distance-5 surface code).
Still, a sober view is needed: the experiment used at most 54 of Willow's 105 qubits, only about 8% of attempts passed all checks, and Google says larger-scale validation is still needed. Practical fault-tolerant quantum computers remain a long way off.
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