Quantum computing just got a stability upgrade.<\/p>\n
French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob has achieved a major milestone in qubit stability, potentially reshaping the path toward scalable quantum machines.<\/p>\n
The company on Thursday announced that its cat qubits can resist one of the main errors in quantum computers, the bit-flip, for more than one hour. This is a remarkable advance over the previous record of 430 seconds (about seven minutes) set in 2024 on Alice & Bob\u2019s Boson 4 chip.<\/p>\n
Quantum computers are extremely sensitive to errors, and bit-flips are one of the two main types that can disrupt calculations.<\/p>\n
By extending the bit-flip lifetime to over an hour, Alice & Bob have effectively removed a significant roadblock in building practical fault-tolerant machines.<\/p>\n
The breakthrough was achieved on Alice & Bob\u2019s latest qubit design, the Galvanic Cat, which also powers their 12-cat qubit chip Helium 2.<\/p>\n
Cat qubits defy decay<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to push the stability of our cat qubits year after year makes us confident that we will deliver on our roadmap,\u201d said Raphael Lescanne, CTO and Co-Founder of Alice & Bob.<\/p>\n
\u201cBit-flip lifetimes are not the only metric that matters, but for cat qubits, they are foundational. The road is still long, but we are advancing fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team\u2019s improvements spanned software optimizations, experimental techniques, and advanced engineering, enabling bit-flip times far beyond previous levels.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, the lifetimes achieved now surpass typical timescales for cosmic ray impacts, suggesting some level of insensitivity by cat qubits to such events.<\/p>\n
At a mean photon number of 11, the researchers measured bit-flip times ranging between 33 and 60 minutes at a 95 percent confidence interval.<\/p>\n
They were also able to run a Z gate operation on the cat qubit with 94.2 percent fidelity in 26.5 ns, a critical step for error correction.<\/p>\n
Hardware needs shrink dramatically<\/p>\n
By virtually eliminating one of the two main error types, Alice & Bob\u2019s cat qubits allow for more efficient error-correcting codes that require far fewer physical qubits.<\/p>\n
If the bit-flip protection holds during gate operations, the hardware needed for large-scale quantum computers could be reduced by up to 200 times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a major step toward early fault-tolerant quantum computing with 100 logical qubits, which is our 2030 roadmap target,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n
The target requires a 13-minute bit-flip lifetime during two-qubit gate operations, which the new results exceed by a significant margin.<\/p>\n
Superconducting qubits from other companies typically achieve bit-flip times of just 25 milliseconds, making Alice & Bob\u2019s<\/a> record more than a million times longer.<\/p>\n This massive leap in stability could make quantum devices more reliable and practical for materials science, cryptography, and other applications.<\/p>\n The company now plans to further evaluate the performance of these cat qubits<\/a> under two-qubit gates, which is a critical requirement for building functional quantum <\/a>computers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quantum computing just got a stability upgrade. French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob has achieved a major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[41324,41325,41326,111,139,69,393,375,41327,41328,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-47376","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-alice-amp-bob","9":"tag-bit-flip","10":"tag-cat-qubit","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-physics","15":"tag-quantum-computing","16":"tag-quantum-tech","17":"tag-raphael-lescanne","18":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}