Bringing the magic: Google breaks open a bottleneck in quantum computing

Google Quantum AI has demonstratively opened up a key bottleneck in quantum computing: we’ve shown that “magic state cultivation” works in practice on our Willow processor, reducing errors about 40x compared to without it.

This breakthrough, published today in Science, is a crucial step towards scaling up quantum computing to practical use.

The "magic state" bottleneck Since 2004, long before quantum computing was a practical engineering pursuit, researchers have foreseen a particularly tricky bottleneck.

To achieve “universal” quantum computing and execute useful programs, you need to be able to run (and error-correct) a specific set of quantum operations.

An extra challenge is that once you use a magic state, you can’t re-use it, making magic states a scarce resource.