The cat qubit, is a route to fault-tolerant quantum computing. Boson 4 marks the first time a cat qubit has become available to the public.
Quantum bits suffer from two types of errors, bit-flip and phase-flip. Each error occurs dozens of times per second in superconducting qubits in the best cases, usually far more often.
The Boson 4 chip extends the bit-flip time to well over seven minutes – claimed to be a four orders of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art and a world record for superconducting qubits.
Next iterations will focus on improving the phase-flip performance and enabling multi-qubit operation.
Fault tolerance is now seen as a mandatory achievement to unlock the full value of quantum computing.
This chip demonstrates a cornerstone of Alice & Bob’s approach to fault-tolerant quantum computing: embedding bit-flip correction in each qubit. Cat qubits are protected from bit-flips by design, up to the point where additional error-correcting qubits are only needed to tackle the remaining phase-flips. This makes it possible to create fault-tolerant computers using far fewer qubits (up to 200 times fewer, according to the latest paper by Alice & Bob a
With the Boson 4 chip now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, the scientific community can verify the benefits and potential of cat qubits by performing its own experiments.
“When my co-founder and I started Alice & Bob, many thought cat qubits would never be more than a lab concept. We are now the first company to make a cat qubit chip available for everyone to use,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO and co-founder of Alice & Bob. “We are convinced Boson 4 will spark interest among researchers and we are committed to continuously extending the range of experiments which can be performed with it.”
