ECE’s Joseph Bardin Serves on Google Team That Produces “Remarkable Technical Breakthrough” in Quantum Computing

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The new Willow chip

Professor Joseph Bardin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department is part of a large team at Google that produced a huge breakthrough in quantum computing, covered in the New York Times, the BBC, and numerous major publications. The pioneering research, described on December 9 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature (Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold), promises to resolve a momentous problem with current quantum computers. They are too small and too error-prone for most commercial or scientific applications. In response, the Google team has produced a trailblazing quantum chip, dubbed “Willow,” that Google said “paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer” for real-world applications in the future. 

“This work shows a truly remarkable technological breakthrough,” said Chao-Yang Lu, a quantum physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, as reported in a December 9 Nature feature article praising the revolutionary Google research. See ‘A truly remarkable breakthrough’: Google’s new quantum chip achieves accuracy milestone.

Since the fall of 2017, Bardin has served with the Google Quantum AI Group, and he is a member of the team that published the Nature paper. In the ECE department he heads the UMass Amherst Quantum RF Group, which, as he explains, performs “basic research on CMOS- and BiCMOS-integrated electronics to control and measure quantum devices such as qubits, single-photon detectors, and THz mixers. A common theme is that our devices are optimized to work at very low temperatures, often in the range of four to 20 degrees above absolute zero.” 

The Willow chip, which is still in the experimental stage, is the latest development in the field of quantum computing, which is attempting to use the principles of particle physics to create a new type of supercomputer with awesome speed and power.

The Willow chip demonstrates that, with the right error-correction techniques, quantum computers can perform calculations with increasing accuracy as they are scaled up. As a first demonstration of Willow’s power, the Google researchers showed that a quantum computer outfitted with a Willow processor could perform, in roughly five minutes, a task that would take the world’s largest current supercomputer about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

As Google Research announced on its website on December 9 in conjunction with the release of the corresponding Nature paper, “Quantum computers offer promising applications in many fields, ranging from chemistry and drug discovery to optimization and cryptography…But quantum information is delicate, and even state-of-the-art quantum devices will typically experience at least one failure in every thousand operations.” See Google Research announcement: Making quantum error correction work.

The Google Research announcement consequently deduced that, to achieve its potential, the performance of quantum computers “needs to improve dramatically.”

Such dramatic improvement is promised in the groundbreaking development of the Willow chip, which, as the Google Research announcement said, offers “a qualitative change in the way quantum computers perform. This change is powered by combining quantum error correction with our latest superconducting quantum processor, Willow. Willow is the first processor where error-corrected qubits get exponentially better as they get bigger.”

According to the Google Research announcement, “This [research] demonstrates the exponential-error suppression promised by quantum-error correction, a nearly 30-year-old goal for quantum computing and the key element to unlocking large-scale quantum applications.”

The Google Research announcement concluded that, for now, Willow is a largely experimental device, meaning that “a quantum computer powerful enough to solve a wide range of real-world problems is still years – and billions of dollars – away.” 

Meanwhile, as a BBC article summarized this groundbreaking research project, Google has unveiled a truly “mind-boggling quantum-computing chip.” 

Beyond his cutting-edge work with Google, Bardin is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, the UMass College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, and the UMass Convocation Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activities. 

Another member of the Google team listed in the Nature paper is Shirin Montazeri, a 2018 UMass Amherst ECE PhD alum who is now a Senior Silicon Design Engineer at Google and was also involved in the Willow project.