Key takeaways
- Cat qubits use a bosonic encoding that autonomously suppresses bit-flip errors in hardware, so error correction only has to handle phase flips
- Because one error type is handled physically, the number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit drops sharply compared to standard superconducting approaches
- Software and compilers will need to be rebuilt around this asymmetric noise model rather than assuming symmetric bit-flip and phase-flip rates
- Alice and Bob is targeting fault-tolerant machines built on cat qubits rather than adding more error correction layers on top of conventional qubits
Summary
Théau Peronnin, CEO and co-founder of Alice and Bob, a company making fault-tolerant quantum computers using cat qubits, is interviewed by Yuval Boger. Theau and Yuval talk about what cat qubits are, why they protect against bit-flip errors, the kind of software that will be required to take advantage of these new machines, and much more.
Read the full transcript on The Quantum Computing Report