Alice & Bob unveils its first quantum hardware system to advance qubit fault tolerance
Fault-tolerant quantum computing specialist Alice & Bob SAS today unveiled its first, full-fledged hardware platform for on-premises deployments, marking its graduation from a quantum chipmaker to a complete system developer.
The new Alice & Bob Helium Quantum System is designed to encode the company’s first logical qubit with as little as 18 cat-qubits. The system – including the processor architecture, control electronics, cabling and software – has been architected to ensure extremely reliable quantum error correction, so users can trust its quantum calculations are correct.
Alice & Bob is at the forefront of a group of European startups racing to build viable quantum computing systems, and is known for pioneering “cat-qubits,” which are named after the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment. Qubits are the main units of computing in quantum systems, similar to the “bits” found in classical computers, and have the ability to represent a 0, 1 or a superposition of both states, which is what makes them so powerful. But they’re also extremely sensitive, and even something as slight as the vibration of a pin falling onto the floor could be enough to disrupt them, resulting in “decoherence” and the emergence of errors in their calculations.
