Squeezed cat qubits from Alice & Bob last 160 times longer against bit flips

[Iconic52]

Alice and Bob's cat qubits have taken another step forward, this time in a peer reviewed paper. Quantum Zeitgeist's Rusty Flint reports on a Nature Communications study by the company with Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-PSL and Inria. The team squeezed their cat qubits into what they call a moon cat shape

The headline number is impressive. The bit flip time rose from 138 milliseconds for a standard cat qubit to 22 seconds, an improvement of about 160 times. The phase flip time stayed the same at 1.3 microseconds, which matters because cat qubits are designed to trade one type of error for the other

The suppression of bit flips also scaled better than before, with an exponent of 4.3 compared with a previous limit of 2 for this kind of qubit. The team saw a fourfold improvement in resilience during a key operation, and a Z gate that ran 1.6 times faster. All of this came from adding a single extra pump to an existing circuit

About 41 authors are listed, led by R. Rousseau and D. Ruiz, with A. Murani as corresponding author. Several authors work for Alice and Bob, and one holds shares in the company, which the paper declares. The results were first shared as a preprint in March 2025, so the news here is the peer reviewed publication

This fits neatly with the PROQCIMA progress report we discussed this week. Making bit flips almost vanish leaves error correction with a much simpler job. If phase flips can be kept under control too, cat qubits could make fault tolerance far cheaper

Are cat qubits the smartest route to fault tolerance? And how much does peer review add to results first shared as a preprint?

Squeezing Quantum States Extends Qubit Coherence 160-foldquantumzeitgeist.com

[Layla17]

An exponent of 4.3 beating the previous limit of 2 shows the physics is still improving. Theory said one thing and experiment found more. Exciting. It suggests even better scaling may be possible with further tweaks. More tweaks like this could push it further still