Alice & Bob reports cat qubit progress in France's PROQCIMA programme

[Laura53]

French quantum startup Alice & Bob has published its first phase results from PROQCIMA, France's long term quantum computing procurement programme. The Quantum Insider's Matt Swayne reports on the progress, which focuses on the company's cat qubits

PROQCIMA is a ten year programme worth 500 million euros. It aims for two prototypes with 1,000 logical qubits by 2032. Alice & Bob competes alongside Pasqal, Quandela, Quobly and C12, and Quantum Computing Report adds that the second phase, running from 2026 to 2028, is worth 150 million euros

Alice & Bob ran three demonstration chips, two with six qubits and one with twelve. On these it showed CNOT gates between cat qubits that keep their built in protection against bit flips, measure and reset sequences for helper qubits, several rounds of a distance three repetition code, and a non Clifford gate on a cat qubit

Cat qubits are designed so that one type of error, bit flips, is almost eliminated by the physics, leaving error correction to deal mainly with phase flips. That could make fault tolerance much cheaper. The company is honest that its logical error rate across the full register is not yet below threshold

A digital twin suggests that more uniform coherence across the chip is the first thing to fix. Its monitoring software tracks more than 50 indicators per qubit. Steady, transparent progress reports like this are welcome, even when the results show there is work still to do

Are cat qubits a realistic shortcut to fault tolerance? And can France's programme produce a 1,000 logical qubit machine by 2032?

Alice & Bob Reports Cat-Qubit Progress in French Quantum Computing Programthequantuminsider.com