Dr. Anthony Megrant is a Research Scientist at Google where he leads the Quantum Device Team. His team is responsible for the design, fabrication and characterization of Google’s quantum processors and their integration with the control system. He left the U.S. Army with an honorable discharge in 2001 as a Sergeant. He received his B.S in applied physics from Cornell University in 2009 and his PhD in materials engineering from University of California Santa Barbara in 2016. Since joining Google in 2015, Anthony and his team have worked to improve the performance and increase the scale of quantum processors. Anthony co-designed Google’s 54 qubit Sycamore processor and led its fabrication, buildout and testing. The Sycamore processor achieved “beyond classical” computational performance for the first time in 2019.
Quantum error correction holds the potential to reduce the physical error rates in cutting edge quantum processors currently near 1e-3 to below the 1e-10 error rates required by many practical applications. However combining physical qubits to create logical qubits with exponentially reduced error rates has not been demonstrated. In this talk, I will describe Google Quantum AI’s progress toward this goal using an improved Sycamore processor based on superconducting qubits. We demonstrate the exponential suppression of bit or phase errors with 100x reduction in error rates by running repetition codes with up to 21 qubits. This work also provides a benchmark allowing us to project the performance of larger codes. I will describe how these results are a step along a series of milestones toward an error-corrected quantum computer.