Google shows a key quantum computing technique working on real hardware
Quantum computers need a steady supply of special resource states, often called magic states, to run the most useful kinds of algorithms. Producing them cleanly has been one of the big obstacles on the road to error corrected machines. Google says its team has now demonstrated a technique called magic state cultivation on its Willow processor, and that it cut errors by roughly 40 times compared with running without it. The work was published in the journal Science. It is still research, not a finished product, but it removes a bottleneck that researchers have long expected to slow the path toward practical, fault tolerant quantum computing.