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.

Cat-qubits, on the other hand, are a special kind of qubit designed to be more resistant to errors. That’s because they store quantum information across multiple particles, which makes it less likely that the data they store will be corrupted. They also have a hardware-efficient design that reduces the requirements for faults to occur.

Alice & Bob says cat-qubits are especially good at suppressing “bit-flip errors,” which is one of the two main kinds of error that plague quantum computing platforms today. This property is key to building fault-tolerant quantum computers that can be useful in real-world applications.

The Helium Quantum System is an upgradeable system that will also be able to support Alice & Bob’s upcoming 48-cat-qubit chipset, which is expected to feature multiple logical qubits when it debuts next year. With its launch, the company said, it’s inviting researchers to conduct experiments and collaborate with it on advancing fault tolerance for quantum machines. It supports the integration of both quantum and classical computing resources within a single system, similar to those found at high-performance computing centers.

Alice & Bob is inviting research partners to conduct experiments on the Helium Quantum System and collaborate with the company on advancing fault tolerant quantum computing research. The system enables researchers to integrate quantum and classical computing resources within a single computing infrastructure, such as those found at high-performance computing centers. By providing direct access to cat-qubit architecture, Alice & Bob offers a platform for research into quantum error correction, logical qubits and the path to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Théau Peronnin said the Helium Quantum system differs from other quantum computers because the company has focused on fault tolerance from the very beginning. “Our cat-qubit architecture is designed to dramatically reduce the error-correction overhead — one of the industry’s largest technical and economic barriers,” he said. “We believe the defining race in quantum computing is building better qubits that can reach fault tolerance with the fewest resources.”

The new hardware is designed to be dropped into existing on-premises computing systems and it’s incredibly energy efficient, requiring just 40 kilowatts of power to run. This helps to eliminate another major hurdle to quantum computing adoption, which is the high cost of running existing hardware systems.

Alongside the physical hardware, Alice & Bob has released a custom monitoring interface called Starboard that provides full visibility into the 18-cat-qubit system. Administrators can visualize system behavior, track individual cat-qubit performance, view live metrics and schedule workloads from a single dashboard. Peronnin said the Helium Quantum System is compatible with common HPC scheduling tools such as Slurm via the open-source QRMI library and others.

Image: Alice & Bob