Google's Willow Quantum Chip: A Leap Forward Without Compromising Modern Cryptography

Google’s most recent quantum computing chip, named Willow, represents a major milestone in positing practical, large-scale quantum computers. Unveiled in December 2024, Willow tackles crucial obstacles in quantum error correction and showcases computational abilities that exceed those of classical supercomputers.

Key Features and Innovations of Willow:

Willow’s 105 superconducting qubits, each existing in multiple states at once, allow for complex calculations impossible for traditional bits.

Quantum Error Correction has been a significant challenge in quantum computing because environmental disturbances cause errors in qubits. Willow has made significant progress in this area by employing advanced error correction techniques. This approach has resulted in exponential error reduction as the number of qubits increases, a milestone that researchers have been pursuing for almost three decades.

Benchmark tests showed Willow effortlessly completed complex computations in under five minutes. When executed on the most advanced classical supercomputers, this task would take approximately 10 septillion years (1 followed by 25 zeros). This mind-boggling timeframe far exceeds the age of the universe.

Coherence Time: The chip has a coherence time of nearly 100 microseconds, which is a significant improvement of five times compared to its predecessor, Sycamore. This advancement enables qubits to retain their quantum state for longer, thereby facilitating the execution of more complex computations.

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Implications and Future Prospects:

Willow’s advancements bring the era of practical quantum computing closer, with potential applications in fields such as drug discovery, materials science, and artificial intelligence. However, experts caution that widespread commercial use remains years away, as the technology is still in the experimental stages.

Experts predict quantum computers may render current encryption systems obsolete. However, Google has informed The Verge that its new Willow chip, touted as a “breakthrough,” is still far from being ready for such advancements.

“The Willow chip cannot break modern cryptography,” Google Quantum AI director and COO Charina Chou tells The Verge.

In 2022, the White House issued a warning about the potential dangers of a “cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer” (CRQC). It stated that such a computer could pose a threat to civilian and military communications, compromise supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure, and bypass security protocols for most Internet-based financial transactions. As a result, the White House mandated that US agencies must adopt new systems to mitigate this risk by 2035.

However, according to Google, Willow is not a CRQC. Although the company asserts that it can solve a computing challenge in just five minutes, a task that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer ten septillion years, Google has only created 105 physical qubits with that computing power. They estimate they would require millions more to crack the codes.

Will Quantum Computers Break Crypto?

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