Alice & Bob has
unveiled its white paper and five-year roadmap. The White paper outlines a
clear path to achieving useful quantum computing through Alice & Bob's cat
qubit technology, which promises to deliver high-fidelity logical qubits while
using significantly fewer hardware and energy resources compared to alternative
approaches.
The roadmap
details five key milestones in Alice & Bob's plan to deliver a universal,
fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2030:
Milestone 1: Master the Cat Qubit
Achieved in
2024 with the Boson chip series, this milestone established a reliable,
reproducible cat qubit capable of storing quantum information while resisting
bit-flip errors.
Milestone 2: Build a Logical Qubit
Currently under
development with the Helium chip series, this stage focuses on creating the
company's first error-corrected logical qubit operating below the
error-correction threshold.
Milestone 3: Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing
With the
upcoming Lithium chip series, Alice & Bob aims to scale multi-logical-qubit
systems and demonstrate the first error-corrected logical gate.
Milestone 4: Universal Quantum Computing
The Beryllium
chip series will enable a universal set of logical gates enabled by magic state
factories and live error correction, unlocking the ability to run any quantum
algorithm.
Milestone 5: Useful Quantum Computing
The Graphene
chip series, featuring 100 high-fidelity logical qubits, will deliver a quantum
computer capable of demonstrating quantum advantage in early industrial use
cases by 2030, integrating into existing high-performance computing (HPC)
facilities.
"Our roadmap
lays out a clear path to solving quantum's toughest engineering challenges,"
said Raphael Lescanne, CTO and Co-Founder of Alice & Bob. "Quantum
computing can seem opaque, but it shouldn't be. This white paper makes our
technology and roadmap accessible for engineers, business leaders and tech
enthusiasts alike."
The white
paper, titled "THINK INSIDE THE BOX: QUANTUM COMPUTING WITH CAT
QUBITS," outlines Alice & Bob's endeavors by illustrating
how quantum physics enables a richer computing model capable of addressing
problems beyond classical computing, including simulations, machine learning
and material science. Quantum computing promises transformative applications
across industries such as finance, healthcare and cybersecurity.
Achieving
practical quantum advantage requires overcoming the errors inherent in quantum
systems. Quantum error correction typically relies on additional qubits to
detect and correct these errors, but the resource requirements grow
quadratically with complexity, making large-scale, useful quantum computing a
significant challenge.
Alice & Bob's
cat qubits offer a promising solution to this bottleneck. These superconducting
chips feature an active stabilization mechanism that effectively shields the
qubits from some external errors. This unique approach has enabled cat qubits
to set the world record for bit-flip protection, one of the two major types of
errors in quantum computing, effectively eliminating them.
This protection
reduces error correction from a 2D problem to a simpler, 1D problem, enabling
error correction to scale more efficiently. As a result, Alice & Bob can
produce high-quality logical qubits with 99.9999% fidelity, what they call a
"6-nines" logical qubit, using a fraction of the resources required by other
approaches.
"Quantum
computing should be a tool for solving useful problems in science and industry.
This white paper shows how Alice & Bob's cat qubits can bring that vision
to life in a practical way by the decade's end," said Théau Peronnin CEO
and co-founder of Alice & Bob.
Alice &
Bob's roadmap can be discovered as the fourth part of the
white
paper.