Time, one of the most implacable enemies of quantum computing, has just been defeated for the first time in history; cat qubits, peculiar and ingenious versions of superconducting qubits, remained stable for more than a full hour, something that seemed unlikely until recently.
The achievement comes from the French startup Alice and Bob, which had already surprised the world in 2024 with 7 minutes of stability, but now raised the level to a new dimension. The experiment was conducted with the Galvanic Cat, a project that powers the company's 12-qubit Helion 2 chip.
Unlike conventional qubits, cat qubits are designed to resist one of the most destructive errors in quantum computing, the bitfet, when a zero is converted to one or vice versa, compromising the entire calculation and the feat is not trivial, while common superconducting qubits resist this error for only 25 milliseconds, Alice and Bob's cat qubits reached more than 60 minutes.
To understand the magnitude of this breakthrough, imagine holding a soap bubble in the air, it normally bursts in seconds, but here scientists created a technique for that bubble to not only last, but stay intact for an hour, that's exactly what cat qubits did against quantum decay.
The discovery goes beyond the record, by practically eliminating one type of quantum error, the researchers reduced the need for physical qubits for error correction by up to 200 times. In practical terms, this means that the dream of scalable quantum computers with 100 logical qubits by 2030 is getting closer.
The team also managed to execute Z-gate operations with 94.2% fidelity in just 26.5 nanoseconds, showing that the qubits are not only stable, but functional. Another surprising detail is that the life times achieved even exceed the scale of cosmic ray impacts, suggesting unprecedented resilience.
If confirmed in two-qubit operations, these results could redefine the entire architecture of quantum computing, instead of thousands of fragile qubits, perhaps enough of these robust “quantum cats” to open the doors to a future where cryptography, materials science and even simulations of the entire universe become possible.
Schrodinger's puzzle just gained a concrete application, and if Alice and Bob's quantum cats really turn out to be as resilient as they seem, we may be looking at the first big leap toward the era of practical quantum computing.
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