Eviden and Alice & Bob partner to enhance quantum computing with cat qubit integration

Quantum computing company Eviden SAS, an Atos SE company, today announced a new partnership with French quantum computing startup Alice & Bob to integrate Alice & Bob’s cat qubit technology into Eviden’s quantum application development platform, Qaptiva.

Named after the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, cat qubits are a type of superconducting qubits that are being developed to make quantum computers more robust and resistant to errors. Cat qubits address the issue where traditional qubits, which can be in a state of 0, 1 or a “superposition” of both, are sensitive to their environment. Any disturbance can cause a qubit to “decohere” and lose its superposition state, leading to computational errors.

By contrast, cat qubits are designed to be “error-protected” by incorporating error correction that stores quantum information across many particles, making them more resilient to environmental disturbances. Alice & Bob’s cat qubits include a hardware-efficient design that reduces the hardware requirements for a fault-tolerant quantum computer by up to 60 times compared to other qubit technologies.

Through the new partnership, Eviden will feature Alice & Bob’s cat qubits as an emulation target within its Qaptiva application development platform to deliver fault-tolerant quantum computing. With the integration, users will be able to learn how to use the “biased noise” of cat qubits to implement quantum error correction, which is said to be a crucial mechanism to escape the noise plaguing all quantum computers.

Biased noise refers to certain types of errors that are more likely to occur than others because of particular characteristics or vulnerabilities of the qubit’s design or the system it’s in. Tracking biased noise can be leveraged in the error correction process.

With the support for cat qubits, Qaptiva users can now experiment with them and emulate the behavior of architectures creating several logical qubits, each made with several physical qubits. Cat qubits will also be supported as a compilation target to improve current quantum algorithms. Although that’s not available at launch, Eviden noted that it also plans to give access to real quantum computers featuring cat qubits and optimized compilation at a later date.

“The Qaptiva platform enables our customers to explore the rich universe of quantum computing technologies and today’s addition makes it richer than ever,” Fédric Bourrasset, global head of HPC-AI and quantum computing at Eviden, said ahead of the announcement. “Alice & Bob’s cat qubits are a fascinating building block for fault-tolerant quantum computers.”

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