Anthony Megrant

Timeline

1. 2001–2009

   From the Army to Cornell

   He leaves the U.S. Army with an honorable discharge in 2001 as a Sergeant. In 2009, he earns a B.S. in applied physics from Cornell University.

2. 2014

   Surface code threshold gates

   In 2014, he is among the authors of a Nature paper from the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with John M. Martinis among the coauthors. Their five-qubit superconducting processor reaches an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.92 per cent and a two-qubit gate fidelity of up to 99.4 per cent, at the fault-tolerance threshold for surface code quantum computing.

3. 2015–2016

   Joining Google and a UCSB PhD

   After doctoral research in John Martinis's group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2009 to 2016, he joins Google in 2015 as a Quantum Electronics Engineer to work on the performance and scale of quantum processors. He receives his PhD in materials engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2016.

4. 2019

   Sycamore and beyond-classical computation

   He co-designs Google's 54-qubit Sycamore processor and leads its fabrication, buildout and testing, reaching beyond-classical computational performance in 2019. The 2019 Nature paper on Sycamore, with him among the authors, reports a 53-qubit quantum circuit sampled a million times in about 200 seconds, a task that its benchmarks put at approximately 10,000 years for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer.

5. 2021

   Leading the Quantum Device Team

   In 2021, he is a Research Scientist at Google who leads the Quantum Device Team, responsible for the design, fabrication and characterization of Google's quantum processors, and serves as a keynote speaker at IEEE Quantum Week.

6. 2023

   Scaling a surface code logical qubit

   In 2023, he is among the authors of a Nature paper on suppressing quantum errors in which a distance-5 surface code logical qubit modestly outperforms an ensemble of distance-3 logical qubits on average.

7. December 2024–January 2025

   Willow and below-threshold error correction

   In December 2024, Google's Quantum AI team unveils the Willow chip, and a Google blog tour of the lab credits him as Chief Architect of the Quantum AI Lab, alongside Yu Chen, Director of the Quantum Processor. He is among the authors of the December 2024 Nature paper presenting two below-threshold surface code memories on Willow, a distance-7 code and a distance-5 code integrated with a real-time decoder. In January 2025, as chief architect for the quantum program, he credits Google's decision to construct an onsite manufacturing facility as a major factor in the Willow chip's success.

8. May 2025

   Scaling superconducting quantum computers

   In May 2025, he and Yu Chen publish "Scaling up superconducting quantum computers" in Nature Electronics from Google Quantum AI in Goleta, California. They write that scaling from hundreds of qubits to a fault-tolerant machine with millions of components requires advances in materials, hardware testing and system architecture, along with sustained collaboration between industry and academia.