Alice & Bob, a French start-up seeking to develop a fault-resistant quantum computer via “cat qubits”, announced this Wednesday that it would make its latest “Boson 4” chip available on the Google Cloud marketplace. This is the first chip developed by the start-up to be accessible to professional customers.
Alice & Bob ensures that it extends the duration of resistance to errors affecting qubits
Generally speaking, qubits are vulnerable to two types of errors: the “bit-flip”, which transforms a 0 into 1, or vice versa, and the “phase-flip”, which changes a positive qubit to negative and vice versa. versa. To reduce this quantum decoherence, Alice & Bob relies on “cat qubits”, made from superconducting circuits, which are less sensitive to errors.
The start-up estimates that this new “Boson 4” chip extends the duration of resistance to “bit-flip” type errors to seven minutes. An innovation that represents a “four orders of magnitude improvement” compared to current technology, and a world record for superconducting qubits. Until now, most quantum computers of this type could suffer several dozen “bit-flip” errors per second. Alice & Bob specifies that it would soon focus on improving resistance to “phase-flip” errors and the launch of“multi-qubit operations”.
A first for a French quantum start-up on Google Cloud
“When we created Alice & Bob, many thought cat qubits would be little more than a laboratory concept, declared Théau Peronnin, CEO and co-founder of Alice & Bob. (…) We are confident that 'Boson 4' will attract interest from researchers and we are committed to continually expanding the range of experiments that can be carried out with this project.” Apart from Alice & Bob, the services of the American quantum computing company IonQ are accessible on Google Cloud.
Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob now has over 95 employees. At the end of March, it announced that it had obtained a grant of 16.5 million euros as part of the France 2030 investment plan, with the objective of reducing the production costs of a quantum computer by ten. Alice & Bob is also part of the Proqcima program, launched at the beginning of March by the general delegate for armaments and including other quantum start-ups. An initiative which aims to develop, by 2030, fault-tolerant quantum computers with 128 logical qubits.
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